US Copyright Office: OW0643-STM-CreativeCommons

SAVE THE MUSIC/CREATIVE COMMONS “Orphan Works” Comments
March 25, 2005
Proceedings before the US. Copyright Office

Notice of Inquiry on “Orphan Works”
Submitted by:
Lawrence Lessig
Jennifer Stisa Granick
Lauren Gelman
Christopher Sprigman
Center for Internet and Society
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
On behalf of:
SAVE THE MUSIC
Roman Ajzen, Co-CEO
5436 Harvest Run Drive
San Diego, CA 92130
CREATIVE COMMONS
Mia Garlick
General Counsel
543 Howard Street
5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105-3013
Comments of:
CREATIVE COMMONS AND SAVE THE MUSIC
SAVE THE MUSIC and CREATIVE COMMONS welcome this opportunity to provide
comments to the Copyright Office, and, ultimately, to the U.S. Congress, on the problem posed
by Orphan Works1 and to submit the attached proposal.
1
As discussed in greater detail in Part A(II) infra, SAVE THE MUSIC and CREATIVE
COMMONS define an “Orphan Work” as any copyrighted work that is out-of-print or otherwise
not commercially exploited, and where the rightsholder is difficult, after reasonable efforts, or
impossible to find.
1
SAVE THE MUSIC, a group that wants to archive a mostly orphaned genre of music,
and CREATIVE COMMONS, an organization that provides tools for copyright owners to signal
what rights they reserve and what uses they approve, strongly believe the Orphan Works
problem is a serious one—one that impedes productive uses of works and merits a legislative
response. We believe that our experiences with Orphan Works allow us to offer relevant and
useful insight into the problem the current system poses and why it cannot be solved without a
change in the law. We believe that there is a workable, fair solution to this problem that may
readily be implemented without threatening either the interests of copyright owners who wish to
prevent use of their work, or the compliance of the United States with its treaty obligations.
* * *
I. INTERESTS OF SAVE THE MUSIC AND CREATIVE COMMONS IN THIS

PROCEEDING
A. SAVE THE MUSIC < http://savethemusic.com/>
1. SAVE THE MUSIC’s Mission
SAVE THE MUSIC (STM) is a project of the Internet Development Fund, a California
501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Jewish cultural music through
its digitization and placement on the Internet. Daniel and Roman Ajzen founded STM in 1998 as
a result of research conducted for a high school family history project. In just seven years, STM
has become the leading collector of Yiddish LP's in the world, archiving over 8,000 records.
Upon receipt, STM re-masters the recordings and makes them available for streaming through its
website, where it also provides historical information, lyrics, translations, sheet music, and other
resources. STM complements its archivist activities with forums for current artists and a virtual
2
bulletin board to announce performances and recent releases. STM also occasionally sponsors
concerts and other activities.
STM does not charge for access to the content on the web site and depends entirely upon
donations for all its activities. STM has received donations of records, labor, and money from
every continent and has volunteer representatives in nineteen cities worldwide.
2. SAVE THE MUSIC’s Experience of the Orphan Works Problem
STM repeatedly encounters problems identifying the appropriate rightsholder for many of
the works it would like to make publicly available. For example, as stated, along with the
recordings themselves, STM has considerable copyrighted non-audio holdings such as music
sheets, lyrics, books, drawings, letters, and newspapers. Practically all of these materials were
produced within the last 75 years. Many were produced by small publishers who can no longer
be found and from whom clearance cannot be obtained. STM would like to use these materials
to provide the background knowledge and history necessary to properly understand the music.
Many of these primary sources frame the issues and context of the music far better than any
explanation or description drafted by STM can and are essential to STM’s mission.
Another problem STM faces is that most of the recordings and materials it wishes to
archive were produced overseas. For example, the vast majority of the musical recordings in
STM’s holdings are foreign works that were published before 1970 and were free of U.S.
copyrights—until the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 removed these works from the
public domain and “restored” them to copyright. Many of these musical recordings were issued
by small foreign labels that have since disappeared. As a result, many of these works are Orphan
Works and are essentially unusable.
3
STM is a small organization with a very small budget for its archiving work. Because of
its reliance on donations, STM does not have the financial capacity to retain an attorney to
investigate the copyright history of each of its thousands of songs.2 The efforts of lay volunteers
are constantly stymied because many of the record companies that issued Yiddish-language
recordings in the past have long since gone out of business and there is no way to determine who
currently holds those copyrights. In other words, STM often faces the unenviable choice to
either spend a large sum on an attorney hoping she can find the copyright owners or to forgo
obtaining rights entirely, thereby exposing itself to crushing liability if it uses the work. The
complexity of the process has forced STM to effectively postpone the digitalization of a large
percentage of its holdings. Thus the problem of Orphan Works has hindered STM’s mission of
documenting, preserving, and spreading Jewish cultural music and other materials and denies the
public the benefit of the cultural value of these works.
To illustrate these points, we offer these specific examples of works that STM would like
to make available, but for which it has not been able to locate the rightsholder:
• Yiddishe Lider – (“Yiddish Songs”). Yiddishe Lider, a book written in Yiddish and
published in Argentina soon after the Second World War, contains first-hand accounts of
life in the Nazi concentration camps. Some of these narratives are truly masterful pieces
and are a testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. STM would like to use
some of the narratives to illustrate the range of emotions experienced by prisoners in the
camps. However, despite STM’s best efforts, it has been unable to locate the rightsholder
2
STM is submitting these comments jointly with CREATIVE COMMONS with generous and
one-off pro bono assistance. Given the number of orphan works STM encounters and their
complex and often international copyright history, it is not feasible for STM to secure pro bono
assistance each and every time it needs to investigate the copyright history of songs it wishes to
preserve.
4
for this work: the publishing house is defunct and STM could not locate any records
indicating who, if anyone, now holds the rights to the book. As a result, STM has been
unable to share its contents with the world and because of similar problems with other
works from that time-period, development of the Holocaust section of STM’s website is
on hold.
• The Partisan’s Hymn. STM would like to pair the accounts of concentration camp life in
Yiddishe Lider with perhaps the most important Yiddish song of all time, Zog nit Kayn
Mol (Never Say or The Partisan’s Hymn). According to scholars, The Partisan’s Hymn
was the anthem and rallying cry of the Jewish resistance during WWII and is an
affirmation of the Jewish will to survive:
Never say that you are going on your last way

Though leaden clouds may be concealing skies of blue -
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
And our marching steps will thunder: We are here!
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
And our marching steps will thunder: We are here!
Even today The Partisan’s Hymn is played at funerals of Jewish martyrs and
retains a fundamental position in Jewish culture. Sixty years after the end of WWII, at a
time when the Jewish people are again facing serious threats from the rise of anti-
Semitism and Islamic fundamentalism, STM believes its message of resistance,
perseverance, and hope remains as important and relevant as ever.
STM envisions an entire section dedicated to this song, its performers, and its
history. The proposed section will contain numerous musical versions, lyrics, music
sheets, and considerable historical background. It will be the anchor of STM’s Holocaust
content. As one would expect for such an important song, many different versions have
been recorded over the years. Dozens of these were published overseas and are thus
5
subject to copyright protection under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. In particular,
STM plans to use a version sung by the Polish Army Orchestra and produced by the Lira
Record Company in Poland just after the end of World War Two. STM possesses none
of the accompanying materials for this record, such as the album cover or slip sheet, and
consequently has very limited information with which to find the copyright owner. STM
has unsuccessfully conducted Internet and library searches for additional information,
and has been unable to even find another copy. Though it is possible additional copies
exist in Poland, STM does not have the resources to investigate further. This record is
significant because it was one of the few conciliatory efforts after the war between Jews
and Poles and demonstrates the relationship between each group’s resistance efforts. But
the prospect that STM will obtain clearance for this work and many others like it is not
good, for in addition to the normal difficulties attendant to obtaining copyright clearance,
STM now has to go through the process of identifying rightsholders in countries all over
the world. The cost, both in money and time, of locating far-flung rightsholders makes
pursuing clearance prohibitively expensive. Currently, only the largest and best funded
organizations can even afford to attempt to track down the copyright owners; for a non-
profit organization like STM, it is practically impossible.
• Ludwig Satz Sings His Most Famous Yiddish Theatre Classics. STM’s mission is not
only to preserve Jewish music, but also to make clear its importance to today’s culture--
thereby ensuring its future relevance. To this end, STM plans a section to illustrate
Yiddish music’s influence on general American culture. Ludwig Satz is an anthology of
songs from Yiddish musicals in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Many of these songs later
served as inspirations for songs in Broadway musicals and many of the writers,
6
composers, and singers went on to work in Broadway. By tracing the careers of those
involved in Ludwig Satz, STM hopes to show the breadth of Yiddish culture and its
relevance to wider American culture.
The Greater Recording Company published this recording in the United States in
1973; it is thus under copyright protection. However, despite STM’s best efforts, it has
been unable to locate the rightsholder for this recording. After failing to find any trace of
the Greater Recording Company or the rightsholder, STM attempted to find some leads in
the property’s title history, but it was to no avail. STM also spoke with several
performers who were active during the company’s existence to see if they had any
information, but that too proved unsuccessful. At this point, STM was confronted with
the choice between hiring a professional or simply not using the songs. Unfortunately,
STM had no real choice but the latter. The difficulties STM has encountered in obtaining
copyright clearance for this and similar works have led it to postpone development of its
section on the intertwining of Yiddish and American culture.
3. The Current System Frustrates Both SAVE THE MUSIC’s Creative

Vision and Copyright’s Purpose
STM is participating in this proceeding to urge the Copyright Office and Congress to
amend the current system so that the organization can make these valuable and disappearing
cultural resources available without fear that it will be sued. STM has experienced the
difficulties posed by Orphan Works and strongly believes that a more user-friendly system must
be developed. STM’s encounters with Orphan Works arise because its collection was mainly
produced by small, independent recording companies. Many of them moved in and out of the
marketplace quickly and did not leave clues regarding what happened to them or their
copyrights. Nevertheless, works created by these companies do not lose their cultural value
7
simply because their owner cannot be located. The current system deprives creators and
archivists like STM of the opportunity to reintroduce them to the world. With the advent of the
Internet, resuscitating old songs and introducing them into popular consciousness is now possible
but the complexities of the law prevent STM from sharing some of the bright lights of Jewish
culture. STM would happily secure permission to use these works if it could find the owners. It
is very frustrating for STM to have a specific creative vision and realizable goals yet be
restrained from pursuing them by copyright rules that benefit neither the rightsholder nor the
public at large. STM has learned that the current rules for Orphan Works impede its ability to
share its content despite its best efforts and intentions.
B. CREATIVE COMMONS <http://creativecommons.org>
1. The Mission of CREATIVE COMMONS
CREATIVE COMMONS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in San Francisco, offers from its
website to the general public a set of technical and legal tools, free of charge, that empower
creators to signal how they want their works used beyond the one-size-fits-all rules built into
current copyright law, and enable users to find works where the creator has signaled that certain
uses are permitted.
One tool is a suite of standardized copyright licenses that authors, artists, and publishers
can use to virtually “stamp” their online works with an alternative copyright notice. In contrast
to the traditional copyright notice – “(c) 2005. All rights reserved.” -- the CREATIVE
COMMONS copyright notice reads “(cc) 2005. Some rights reserved.” As the language implies,
the CREATIVE COMMONS form of notice is meant to draw the average Internet user’s
attention to the fact that the stamped work is available on terms somewhat less restrictive than
8
current copyright law would otherwise impose. The notice itself contains a hyperlink that leads
to a short summary of the legal terms associated with the stamped work: “Anyone is free to copy
my photograph,” for example, “provided they give me credit as the artist, and provided they do
not profit from their use.”3
This “human-readable” legal summary then links to a fuller, more traditional – and
legally binding – copyright license, drafted by CREATIVE COMMONS and lawyers from the
Silicon Valley law firms Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Cooley Godward LLP. The
“lawyer-readable” license spells out in detail what freedoms the user enjoys and what conditions
govern that use.
The CREATIVE COMMONS “Some Rights Reserved” notice also contains mark-up
language that, though invisible to the human eye, acts as a technological notice to search
technologies. This “machine-readable” version of the copyright notice, which is expressed at the
source-code level of the web page, facilitates the proper functioning of CREATIVE
COMMONS’ second free tool: the CC smart search engine
<http://search.creativecommons.org>.4
This engine scours the web for pages marked with the (cc) virtual stamp, indexes them,
and then lists results by (1) file format type, (2) keyword, and (3) the legal freedoms and
restrictions the copyright holder has associated with the work. Type “Eiffel Tower” into the
3
CREATIVE COMMONS’ tools offer creators the ability to construct a license with a range of
different attributes. The main attributes are: Attribution or no Attribution, Commercial or Non-
commercial Use, Sampling or No Sampling, Derivatives or No-Derivatives and Share-Alike
(where the derived work is required to be licensed under the same terms as the original).
4
The CC search engine is available at CREATIVE COMMONS’ home page and also via a
special search box in the Firefox Internet browser. Yahoo! has also recently released a
customized search engine to enable users to easily locate CREATIVE COMMONS-licensed
works according to their specific criteria. <http://search.yahoo.com/cc>
9
dialog box, for example, specify “image” format, and click the “noncommercial use” button, and
the user sees a list of all the CREATIVE COMMONS-licensed photographs of the Eiffel Tower
available under a noncommercial license.
The one-two punch of the machine-readable copyright licenses, on the one hand, and
smart copyright search engines, on the other, vastly reduces unnecessary transaction costs
between producers who want to share some uses of their content and consumers looking for
royalty-free content and who are willing to accept certain restrictions on their use.
CREATIVE COMMONS’ marking and searching technologies have unearthed an unmet
demand far larger than even the organization anticipated. CREATIVE COMMONS first made
the CC licenses available in December of 2002. One year later, there were over 1 million web
pages carrying the “(cc) Some Rights Reserved” notice and license, according to a Yahoo! link-
back search. Today, there are over 10 million web pages under the CC licenses. What this shows
is that a large number of creators do not believe that the restrictions that current copyright law
imposes are appropriate for their particular works. Creators that choose a CC license are
signaling that something less than full-bore copyright is best for them. And this demand for
“Some Rights Reserved” licenses is not limited to the United States. CREATIVE COMMONS
has built an international network of lawyers in over 50 countries; today it offers the CC licenses
in 12 different languages, adapted to the laws of 15 different jurisdictions. Adopters of the
licenses include authors and producers as varied as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Rice University, the Public Library of Science, Flickr.com (home to over half a million CC-
licensed photographs), musicians David Byrne and the Beastie Boys, Brazilian Minister of
Culture Gilberto Gil, filmmaker Robert Greenwald, federal appeals court judge Richard Posner,
and more.
10
2. The Success of CREATIVE COMMONS Suggests a Solution to the

Orphan Works Problem
Creative Commons is participating in this proceeding to urge the Copyright Office and
Congress to act to fix the Orphan Works problem, because its experience suggests that a market
solution is not sufficient to solve this problem The most significant lesson arising thus far from
the experience of CREATIVE COMMONS is that clear author signaling about rights – what
rights an author wishes to reserve, and what uses an author is willing to allow – lends valuable
assistance to copyright’s overarching objective of encouraging the creation and dissemination of
copyrighted works. Current copyright law is just like a “no trespassing” sign on land – a user
must assume that she cannot use a work unless she first obtains the owner’s express permission.
But for many works, the cost of seeking permission for each individual use will prevent desired
uses altogether. CC licenses allow authors to provide information to the public that is the
copyright equivalent of a sign on real property allowing certain uses – a sign, for example, that
says “welcome to our store between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.” Thus, authors who wish to
allow certain uses may effectively communicate their desires to would-be users using a CC
license.
This is the model for a solution for Orphan Works – a solution that facilitates clear
signaling that some uses are permitted or that the copyright owner no longer cares what use is
made. However, the private, author-driven approach taken by CREATIVE COMMONS cannot
be used directly to solve the problem of Orphan Works. The CREATIVE COMMONS approach
depends upon the existence of an active rightsholder – i.e., someone who is motivated to invest
in educating herself about the “Some Rights Reserved” approach, and to utilize a CC license for
her work. By their very nature, Orphan Works lack an active rightsholder. For many works that
have never been, or are no longer, commercially exploited, rightsholders are not sufficiently
11
motivated or no longer exist5 to educate themselves about and use a CC license. In addition,
many rightsholders of Orphan Works lack the motivation to comply with the voluntary
registration provisions of current copyright law. As a result, would-be users of Orphan Works
often face insurmountable difficulties in identifying rightsholders and seeking permission, and
CC’s licensing model does not solve this problem.
Although CREATIVE COMMONS licenses cannot solve the problem of Orphan Works,
the organization believes they do point to a solution. The problem with Orphan Works is that
potential users cannot determine if a rightsholder who cannot be found is one who has
abandoned a work to any subsequent uses or one who would disapprove a potential use of the
work. And the potentially high cost of miscalculation has a chilling effect on most small
organizations, libraries, and archives. This chilling effect on creativity and innovation is wildly
disproportionate to the benefit conferred on the very few non-active owners who would
disapprove uses of their work. A set of legal rules that would oblige rightsholders to signal
whether they wish to permit uses of works (in exchange for some statutorily-established
compensation and access to certain other remedies) or whether they wish to retain their full set of
copyrights would provide some certainty to organizations like STM. In addition, and
importantly, such a tool would likely release a flood of similar information locked up by a
system that does not now produce much useful information about ownership and what owners
desire. CREATIVE COMMONS believes that its success in creating and deploying a private
signaling tool lends significant weight to its contention that the solution to the Orphan Works
problem is a statutorily-created signaling tool that will produce information about ownership,
5
Rightsholders are often impossible to find because they are corporate entities that no longer
exist, as is likely in the case of the publisher of the song Yiddishe Lider and the Greater
Recording Company that held the rights to Ludwig Satz Sings His Most Famous Yiddish Theatre
Classics, discussed above, supra Part 1.A.
12
allow owners to express their intentions regarding their works, and enable uses of Orphan Works
that are unused now. The registry proposal contained in Section III of these comments describes
the changes to current copyright law that CREATIVE COMMONS believes are best suited to
effectively and fairly addressing the Orphan Works problem.
* * *
II. THE ORPHAN WORKS PROBLEM IS A SERIOUS ONE THAT MERITS A

LEGISLATIVE RESPONSE
A. The Simultaneous Increase in the Scope of Copyright Protection and the

Elimination of Registration and Renewal Requirements Means that Most Works are
Orphan Works
An Orphan Work is—broadly speaking—any copyrighted work that is out-of-print or
otherwise not commercially exploited, and where the rightsholder is hard (after reasonable
efforts) or impossible to find. Under current U.S. law, those who wish to use an Orphan
Work—to copy it, distribute it, perform or display it, or use it as the building block of a new
work—must ask the rightsholder for permission. But the current U.S. copyright system does not
keep records of copyright ownership that are complete, current, or accessible. So would-be users
can’t find the owners of Orphan Works, even when they’d be willing to pay to use them. In
many cases the works were abandoned because they failed to produce (or no longer produced)
any income. In most cases, rightsholders, once found, are willing to have their work used, often
without compensation or for a nominal royalty. But the cost of identifying rightsholders means
that many desired uses are never made.
This is a serious problem for at least two reasons. First, most copyrighted works are
orphans. Recent historical research suggests that during the 186-year period (from 1790 to 1976)
where U.S. copyright law required would-be copyright owners to affirmatively claim copyright,
13
the authors of less than half of the works otherwise eligible for copyright bothered to register
their works with the Copyright Office, or to mark published copies with copyright notice, as the
law required. All of these works moved into the public domain the moment they were published.
And, importantly, of the subset of works that were copyrighted in the first place, between 85 and
90% fell out of copyright early because rightsholders failed to re-register (i.e., to “renew”) their
copyrights, as the law required up to 1976. So the data show that historically most works were
not valuable enough for owners to provide up-to-date ownership information to facilitate use.
See Christopher Sprigman, Reform(aliz)ing Copyright, 57 Stanford Law Review 485 (2004)
(attached).
Second, the scope of our current copyright law makes the problem worse. Under current
U.S. law, copyright arises whenever creative expression is “fixed” in a tangible medium. As the
result of a series of changes to the copyright laws that began in 1976, U.S. copyright no longer
requires registration, notice, or renewal—we are now living under an “unconditional” copyright
system that attaches the full term of copyright to all works, whether copyright is relevant to an
author’s ability to exploit a particular work or not. So everything from doodlings on a pad to the
latest blockbuster movie is protected by copyright at the moment it is “fixed”, without the author
being required to take any affirmative steps to protect it. All of the works that would otherwise
have fallen out of copyright under the former “conditional” system—either because of failure to
register or give notice, or because of failure to renew—remain in copyright for the (increasingly
long) full term granted under the law. All of these works are orphans, and any filmmaker,
archivist, writer, academic, musician or other person who wishes to use any such work faces the
risk of copyright infringement liability. To avoid that risk, users need to find owners and ask for
permission. But because the copyright system doesn’t keep ownership records, owners are often
14
hard to find or no longer exist and obtaining permission is therefore often prohibitively
expensive or impossible.
B. The Case-by-Case Approach has Failed in Canada and Japan and Should Not Be
Adopted in the United States
SAVE THE MUSIC and CREATIVE COMMONS believe that the copyright laws should
be changed to make it easier for people to use Orphan Works. As described in the Copyright
Office’s Notice of Inquiry,6 there are, broadly speaking, two possible approaches. A typical
“case-by-case” approach would allow use of a particular work only after a would-be user
provides evidence that he has met certain criteria in searching for the work’s owner, without
result, and a panel or court finds the search “reasonable”. A “categorical” approach would set up
rules that separate Orphan Works from other works, and allow use of Orphan Works without the
need to ask for permission or the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits.
SAVE THE MUSIC and CREATIVE COMMONS favor the categorical approach. The
case-by-case approach has been tried in Canada and Japan. In both those countries, persons
wishing to use an Orphan Work apply to a government panel for a license. The panel
determines, for each work for which use is sought, whether the would-be user has made a
“reasonable” attempt to locate the owner; if the search is deemed reasonable and an owner
cannot be found, the panel sets a license fee. Unfortunately, because the panel engages in case-
by-case adjudication, the standards for what constitutes a “reasonable” search, and the fee set for
6
The Copyright Office did not mention in its NOI the Preservation of Orphan Works Act that
passed the Senate last year and is again before Congress this year as part of the Family and
Entertainment Act of 2005. For the sake of completeness, STM and CREATIVE COMMONS
note that, in their view, this bill falls well short of providing any effective remedy for the Orphan
Works problem because it only entitles libraries and archives to make copies of works consistent
with Section 108 of Title 17 of the United States Code and then only within the last 20 years of
the applicable term of copyright.
15
the license, vary. The process is time-consuming and unpredictable. As a result, it is rarely
used. The Canadian system, for example, has issued only 143 licenses since 1990.
III. THE PROPOSAL
A. An Appropriate, Well-tailored Response Would Be to Establish a Registry to

Signal Whether Works are Orphaned or Not
1. Proposal for Published Works
SAVE THE MUSIC and CREATIVE COMMONS recommend that Congress amend
the copyright law to require that holders of copyrights in published works who wish to retain the
full scope of remedies that current copyright law provides register their works within a 25-year
period following publication.
All works—except for computer software—will enjoy a 25-year period of full copyright
protection without the need to register. Because the economic life of computer software often is
much shorter than 25 years (and is almost certain to be much shorter than the full term of
copyright), rightsholders in software will be required to register their works within five years.7
For published works that are registered within the prescribed period, rightsholders will
retain for the full term of copyright the ability to obtain injunctions and actual and statutory
damages against infringers—whatever current law allows
Failure to register within a 25-year period following publication (or five years for
computer software) does not vitiate copyright, but moves the work into “orphan” status. Once a
work is deemed an “orphan”, it may be used without the need to ask permission, and for a
nominal fee payable under a default license applicable to all Orphan Works. No injunctions are
available against use under a default license.
7
The Copyright Office and Congress might wish to identify other types of works where the term
for commercial exploitation is short, and set appropriate deadlines for registering the work.
16
It is important to emphasize that failure to register a work in the Orphan Works Registry
would not remove the work’s copyright protection; it would, rather, serve as a signal that the
unregistered work was an orphan, and, therefore, that the rightsholder was no longer exploiting
the work through any of the channels – customized licensing, infringement damages, injunctions
– that the copyright laws currently offer. Rightsholders who fail to register their works would be
choosing to exploit their works through a lower-cost system of one-size-fits-all default licenses
with no need to identify a rightsholder and ask permission. In this lower transaction cost
environment, many uses of Orphan Works that are impossible now will be made possible.
The default license fee will be payable to an “Orphan Fund”, where owners who did not
register, and who discover uses of their work after the fact may identify themselves and claim
any monies paid to the fund for use of their works. Penalties should be imposed for false claims
against the Orphan Fund.
A search of the registry would be enough to constitute the “reasonable” inquiry required
to determine that a work is orphan – such an approach eliminates the need for judges to set
standards case-by-case for a reasonable search and eliminates uncertainty for users.
Registrants will be required to keep contact information current. If a registrant transfers
ownership of a copyright, whether through sale, gift, or devise, the transferee will be required to
re-register, or the work will move into orphan status if the person listed in the registry is
unreachable, or cannot provide the current rightsholder’s contact information..
The law should also re-install a renewal requirement at 50 years into the copyright term.
Again, the purpose of renewal would not be to vitiate copyright, but to move works in the
registry for which renewal is not sought into orphan status. Non-renewed works would be usable
according to the same rules for default licenses that apply to unregistered works.
17
The databases for registration and renewal need not be administered by the U.S.
Copyright Office. The copyright registration and renewal system should be structured similarly
to the Internet domain name registration system. The government’s role will be limited to
establishing the legal rules and technical protocols according to which copyright registration and
renewal occur. Private firms will be chartered to run competing databases, and to solicit
registration and renewal information. Competition will drive down costs and complexity.
The registration and renewal requirements would apply prospectively. Similar
requirements would also apply retrospectively, but would be implemented only after a period
during which rightsholders of currently unregistered works would be given an opportunity to
register, and thereby to retain the full scope of copyright remedies. Current rightsholders would
be given a period of five years from the effective date of legislation implementing the proposal,
or 25 years from publication, whichever is greater, to register their works. Works for which
registration is not completed during this period would be deemed Orphan Works and would be
made available for use under the default license.
2. Proposal for Unpublished Works
The registry system outlined above that applies to published works would create
significant burdens if it were applied to unpublished works: it would require, for example, the
author of an unpublished email to register that work if he desired to retain the full scope of
copyright remedies. For that reason, a “notice” system should apply to unpublished Orphan
Works.
For the works of natural authors, the notice system will only apply upon the death of the
author. If a death date cannot readily be determined, the law should presume an author’s death
75 years after creation of the work in question. The notice system is limited to the works of dead
18
authors in recognition of the privacy interests individuals have in their own unpublished writings.
Those privacy interests attenuate substantially upon the author’s death.
For the works of corporations, the notice system will apply 10 years after a work’s
creation.
Authors and their heirs may retain their full rights in unpublished works (outside the
notice system) by registering them any time before three years following the author’s death, or
during the 10-year period applicable to corporate works. Rightsholders in unpublished but
registered works will retain the full set of copyright remedies offered under current law.
For unpublished and unregistered works, a would-be user shall be entitled to make a use
if he (1) confirms the death of the author (or that the date of the work’s creation is within the
statutory presumption) for the works of natural authors, or the date of the work’s creation for the
works of corporate authors; (2) confirms the expiration of the three-year period for registration
for the works of natural authors or the 10-year period for the works of corporate authors; and (3)
posts a notice of intent to use for a period of six months in a centrally-administered “Claim Your
Orphan” website (such postings will include a capsule description of the work, and an image of a
portion of the work sufficient to permit recognition – e.g., for text, an image of the title page; for
film, a still of a title frame, or a short piece of streaming video). From time to time, the titles and
capsule descriptions of the works noticed on the Claim Your Orphan website shall be published
in the Federal Register.
Use may commence upon the expiration of the notice period. A nominal fee shall be
payable under the same default license rules that apply to published works.
IV. AS PROPOSED HERE, A ORPHAN WORKS REGISTRY WOULD NOT

INTERFERE WITH U.S. OBLIGATIONS UNDER THE BERNE CONVENTION OR
THE TRIPS ACCORD
19
Finally, none of the changes to copyright law proposed here would create a prohibited
copyright formality under either the Berne Convention or the TRIPs Accord, and therefore
nothing suggested in this proposal would affect the compliance of the United States with these
international agreements.
Both the Berne Convention and the TRIPs Accord prohibit the imposition of formalities
on the works of foreign authors if those formalities interfere with the “enjoyment and exercise”
of copyright. Nothing contained in this proposal would interfere with copyright’s “enjoyment
and exercise”. Failure to register a work in the Orphan Works Registry would not remove the
work’s copyright protection; it would, rather, serve as a signal that the unregistered work was an
orphan, and, therefore, that the rightsholder was no longer exploiting the work through any of the
channels – customized licensing, infringement damages, injunctions – that the copyright laws
currently offer. Rightsholders who fail to register their works would be choosing to exploit their
works through a lower-cost system of one-size-fits-all default licenses with no need to identify a
rightsholder and ask permission. In this lower transaction cost environment, many uses of
Orphan Works that are impossible now will be made possible.
Importantly, whether the default license applies to any particular work is within the
control of the rightsholder. Accordingly, a particular rightsholder’s decision to rely on the
lower-cost default license, rather than the very high-cost rules that current copyright law imposes
on all rightsholders, is not a forfeiture of rights. And it does not detract from the United States’
promise under the Berne Convention and the TRIPs Accord to protect the enjoyment and
exercise of the copyrights of foreign authors. If anything, the creation of an Orphan Works
Registry would promote the enjoyment and exercise of copyright by allowing rightsholders
whose works were unable find a market under current high transaction cost copyright rules to
20
find a market in a lower transaction cost environment that better suits the economics of most
creative works.
For a fuller explanation of why the Orphan Works Registry, and the default licenses
associated with it, do not detract from U.S. adherence to the Berne Convention or the TRIPs
Accord, see Christopher Sprigman, Reform(aliz)ing Copyright, 57 Stanford Law Review 485,
539-545, 551-568 (2004) (attached).
V. CONCLUSION
The Orphan Works problem is a serious one that has a significant impact on access to
information for purposes of research, teaching, learning, and artistic creativity. SAVE THE
MUSIC and CREATIVE COMMONS believe this proposal will solve the problem without
affecting U.S. treaty obligations. It will allow SAVE THE MUSIC to make available culturally
significant materials that are of current public interest without incurring substantial costs to track
down owners and without fear of litigation. A change of law is needed because the problem lies
with inactive rightsholders who are by definition, not likely to opt in to a voluntary system. And,
as the experience of CREATIVE COMMONS has illustrated, a signaling solution where creators
opt out of copyright’s “all rights reserved” in favor of “Some Rights Reserved” has enabled
many thousands of authors to more effectively communicate the scope of permitted uses to be
made of their works. Such private arrangements cannot solve the Orphan Works problem, but
they do point the way toward a solution – a statutorily-established signaling mechanism, which
we have described in the proposal set forth above.
21
Again, we commend the Copyright Office for conducting this important inquiry into the
problem of Orphan Works, and we look forward to the opportunity to discuss our proposal with
you further.
22
SPRIGMAN FINAL 12/17/2004 3:36 PM
REFORM(ALIZ)ING COPYRIGHT
Christopher Sprigman*
INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................... 486
I. THE TRADITIONAL CONTOURS OF “CONDITIONAL” COPYRIGHT ....................... 491
A. Formalities in the Early Copyright Statutes ................................................ 491
B. From Conditional to Unconditional Copyright ........................................... 494
1. Voluntary registration and notice............................................................. 494
2. Renewal .................................................................................................... 498
II. FORMALITIES AND THE “TRADITIONAL CONTOURS” OF CONDITIONAL COPYRIGHT
.............................................................................................................................. 500
A. Recording Ownership .................................................................................. 500
1. “Signaling” .............................................................................................. 501
2. Maximizing private incentives .................................................................. 501
B. Formalities as a Copyright “Filter”............................................................ 502
1. Registration and notice............................................................................. 502
2. Renewal .................................................................................................... 519
3. Effect of the renewal formality on the real term of copyright................... 521
4. The costs of copyright............................................................................... 523
C. Formalities and “Utilitarian” Copyright .................................................... 528
1. The Intellectual Property Clause.............................................................. 529
D. Copyright’s Increasingly Uneasy Fit with the Constitution ........................ 534
1. Term extension without renewal filter ...................................................... 536
2. Formalities as a buffer between copyright and the First Amendment ...... 537
E. Unconditional Copyright and U.S. Accession to the Berne Convention ...... 539
1. The Berne Convention .............................................................................. 539
2. Berne’s rule against formalities ............................................................... 541
3. Berne’s “practical hostility” to formalities.............................................. 543
III. REFORMALIZING COPYRIGHT .......................................................................... 545
A. Defining “Interoperable” Formalities in the Berne Convention................. 545
*
Fellow, Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School. The author would like
to thank Lawrence Lessig, Richard Epstein, Terry Fisher, Graeme Dinwoodie, Glenn Brown,
Lauren Gelman, Jennifer Granick, Elizabeth Rader, Mark Lemley, Laurence Helfer, Abner
Greene, Brett Frischmann, Yuko Noguchi, Goodwin Liu, Kal Raustiala, Justin Hughes, Jim
Pastore, and the participants in the Center for Internet and Society’s Speaker Series for their
helpful discussions and comments. Special thanks to Robert Harlan, Sonia Moss, Anthony
Bliss, Don Krummel, and, especially, Darien Shanske and Joe Gratz for their substantial
assistance with historical materials.
485
486 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 57:485
1. The reciprocity principle .......................................................................... 546

2. The reciprocity principle and neighboring rights agreements ................. 547
3. The reciprocity principle in practice ........................................................ 549
B. Defining “New-Style” Berne-Compliant Formalities.................................. 551
1. Reintroducing old-style formalities for U.S. authors................................ 551
2. Withdrawal from Berne and reliance on the Universal Copyright
Convention.................................................................................................... 552
3. Indefinitely renewable copyright .............................................................. 553
4. The Public Domain Enhancement Act ...................................................... 554
5. New-style formalities ................................................................................ 554
CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 568
INTRODUCTION
The recent debate between those who oppose the current trend of
expanding the duration and breadth of copyright control over creative works
and those who welcome it has focused on large and abstract questions like the
optimal duration of copyright,1 whether extension of subsisting copyrights is
constitutional,2 the degree to which technology has either facilitated or
inhibited control of copyrighted content,3 and the effect that such control has
on free speech, the public domain, and future creativity.4 The debate has
produced an insightful literature and a few creative (but thus far unsuccessful)
lawsuits.5 It has not, however, substantially altered the direction of recent
1. See, e.g., Brief of Amici Curiae George A. Akerlof et al., Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537
U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618) [hereinafter Economists’ Brief]; WILLIAM M. LANDES &
RICHARD A. POSNER, THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW 210-53
(2003).
2. See, e.g., Richard A. Epstein, The Dubious Constitutionality of the Copyright Term
Extension Act, 36 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 123 (2002); Tyler T. Ochoa, Patent and Copyright
Term Extension and the Constitution: A Historical Perspective, 49 J. COPYRIGHT SOC’Y
U.S.A. 19 (2001); Shira Perlmutter, Participation in the International Copyright System as a
Means to Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, 36 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 323
(2002).
3. See, e.g., LAWRENCE LESSIG, CODE AND OTHER LAWS OF CYBERSPACE (1999); James
Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, 66
LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 33 (2003).
4. See, e.g., LAWRENCE LESSIG, FREE CULTURE (2004) [hereinafter LESSIG, FREE
CULTURE]; LAWRENCE LESSIG, THE FUTURE OF IDEAS (2001); Tom W. Bell, Indelicate
Imbalancing in Copyright and Patent Law, in COPY FIGHTS 1 (Adam Thierer & Clyde
Wayne Crews eds., 2002); Robert P. Merges, One Hundred Years of Solicitude: Intellectual
Property Law 1900-2000, 88 CAL. L. REV. 2187 (2000); R. Polk Wagner, Information Wants
to Be Free: Intellectual Property and the Mythologies of Control, 103 COLUM. L. REV. 995
(2003).
5. See Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003); Complaint, Kahle v. Ashcroft, No.
C04-01127 (N.D. Cal. filed Mar. 22, 2004), available at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/
cases/Civil%20Complaint%203-22-04.pdf (last visited Oct. 4, 2004) [hereinafter Kahle
November 2004] REFORM(ALIZ)ING COPYRIGHT 487
developments in the law, which continues to move in the direction of increased

control.
This Article presumes that the trend toward greater control will continue. I
will argue, however, that a few relatively modest and realistically
implementable changes to the copyright laws could help address some of the
legitimate concerns of the copyright critics while preserving the basic structure
of the law that copyright proponents argue has served us well. Curiously, it is a
few relatively small changes to copyright procedure, and not to the substantive
rights granted by copyright, that may allow the law to reach this desirable end.
Copyright formalities. For most of our history, U.S. copyright law has
included a system of procedural mechanisms, referred to collectively as
“copyright formalities,” that helped to maintain copyright’s traditional balance
between providing private incentives to authors and preserving a robust stock
of public domain works from which future creators could draw. From the first
copyright statute in 1790, Congress required that authors register their
copyrights, give notice (by marking published copies with an indication of
copyright status such as the “©” symbol, as well as other information about
copyright ownership), and (perhaps most importantly) renew their rights after a
relatively short initial term by reregistering their copyright. Failure to comply
with these requirements either terminated the copyright (in the case of
nonrenewal) or prevented it from arising in the first place.
Taken together, these formalities created data about the existence and
duration of copyright for the work in question, and about who owned the
copyright. Formalities also facilitated licensing by lowering the cost of
identifying rightsholders, moved works for which copyright was not desired
into the public domain, and encouraged the use of public domain works by
lowering the cost of confirming that a work was available for use.
Deform(aliz)ing copyright. However, in a process that began in earnest
with the Copyright Act of 19766 and culminated in successor legislation like
the Berne Convention Implementation Act,7 the Copyright Renewal Act,8 and
the Copyright Term Extension Act,9 Congress pared back, and in some
instances entirely discarded, copyright formalities. Under current law,
copyright arises the moment an original piece of expression is fixed in a
Complaint]; First Amended Complaint, Golan v. Ashcroft, No. 01-B-1854 (D. Colo. filed
Feb. 18, 2003), available at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/cases/Amended%20
Complaint.pdf (last visited Oct. 4, 2004).
6. Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541 [hereinafter 1976 Act].
7. Pub. L. No. 100-568, 102 Stat. 2853 [hereinafter BCIA].
8. This Act is part of the larger Copyright Amendments Act of 1992. See Copyright
Amendments Act of 1992 §§ 101-102, Pub. L. No. 102-307, 106 Stat. 264, 264-66 (1992)
[hereinafter CAA].
9. Pub. L. No. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827 (1998) [hereinafter CTEA].
“tangible medium of expression.”10 Registration and notice, though

encouraged,11 are not required as conditions of protection. Renewal is gone
altogether.
Beginning with the 1976 Act, then, the United States moved from a
“conditional” copyright system that premised the existence and continuation of
copyright on compliance with formalities to an “unconditional” system in
which a reduced set of voluntary formalities plays only a minor role. Richard
Epstein has aptly characterized these changes as “copyright law . . . flipped
over from a system that protected only rights that were claimed to one that
vests all rights, whether claimed or not.”12 That is a fundamental shift in any
property rights regime, and one that, in the copyright context, represented a
break with almost two centuries of practice.
The advent of unconditional copyright has nonetheless generated little
comment in the academic literature—perhaps because the very term
“formalities” signals that the former requirements were trifling, ministerial, or
more bothersome than helpful. To the extent the issue has been discussed at all,
commentators have generally approved the trend13 as a necessary predicate to
U.S. accession to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and
Artistic Works.14 The Berne Convention is the most significant international
copyright treaty, and it includes a provision prohibiting signatories from
imposing copyright formalities as a condition to the protection of works of
nationals of other member states.15
Reformalizing copyright. This Article lays out a scheme for
“reformalizing” copyright—i.e., for moving copyright back to a conditional
regime—but in a way that accounts for developments in technology and that
allows the United States to remain in compliance with its undertakings in the
Berne Convention and the subsequent Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of
10. 17 U.S.C. § 102 (2000).

11. See infra text accompanying notes 43-58.
12. Epstein, supra note 2, at 124.
13. See, e.g., 4 MELVILLE B. NIMMER & DAVID NIMMER, NIMMER ON COPYRIGHT
§ 17.01[B][1][a] (2004) (observing that Berne’s “enlightened approach to copyright
protection is notable for its antipathy to formalities”); Jane C. Ginsburg & John M.
Kernochan, One Hundred and Two Years Later: The U.S. Joins the Berne Convention, 13
COLUM.-VLA J.L. & ARTS 1, 38 (1988) (listing, among benefits of Berne accession,
elimination of “barbaric forfeitures for lapses in formalities”). But see LESSIG, FREE
CULTURE, supra note 4, at 250 (“Rather than abandoning formalities totally, the response [of
the Berne drafters] should have been to embrace a more equitable system of registration.”).
14. See Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Paris Act,
July 24, 1971, 25 U.S.T. 1341, 828 U.N.T.S. 221 [hereinafter Berne Convention]. All
citations in this Article to the Berne Convention are to the Paris Act unless otherwise noted.
The Paris Act, to which the United States acceded on March 1, 1989, is the currently
effective text of the Berne Convention.
15. Id. art. 3(1).
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs),16 which incorporates by reference

Berne’s standards, including the proscription of formalities.17
Part I of this Article describes the conditional copyright regime that
characterized U.S. law for almost two centuries and explores the role that
formalities played in maintaining copyright’s traditional balance.
Part II sets out the consequences of our post-1976 move away from
conditional copyright and toward an unconditional system. In this Part, I argue
that formalities served an important role in filtering out of copyright works for
which exclusive rights are not expected to provide a benefit to authors, thereby
focusing copyright protection on works for which exclusive rights could be
expected to add to the inducement to creative effort that is the primary
justification for copyright.
The removal of formalities has had a profound effect on the nature and
reach of U.S. copyright law. In fact, although the lengthening of the copyright
term has attracted significant attention, and the removal of formalities almost
none, the latter arguably represents the more significant change in terms of
expanding the domain of copyright beyond works for which application of the
law is useful in inducing investment in creative works, and, consequently,
reducing copyright’s social utility.
It nonetheless may be true that the elimination of mandatory formalities, at
least the particular forms that the law imposed before 1976, made sense given
the circumstances (principally the desire to gain admission to the Berne
Convention) that faced Congress at the time. Very quickly, however, those
circumstances have changed. The growth of the Internet, and, more broadly, of
digital technologies, has opened up new possibilities for public access to and
use of creative works that did not exist when Congress was removing
formalities from copyright law. Before the digital age, the cost of copying and
distribution had more effect on the ability of most people to access, use, and
transform creative works than did the copyright laws. But now digital
distribution is cheap and digital copying is essentially free. Today copyright
law has emerged as the principal barrier to the creative reuse of a large amount
of material that under the former conditional copyright regime would not have
been subject to copyright in the first place. The majority of creative works have
little or no commercial value, and the value of many initially successful works
is quickly exhausted. For works that are not producing revenues, continued
copyright protection serves no economic interest of the author. But in an
16. Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Apr. 15,

1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1C, LEGAL
INSTRUMENTS—RESULTS OF THE URUGUAY ROUND vol. 31, 33 I.L.M. 81 (1994) [hereinafter
TRIPs].
17. TRIPs Article 9 incorporates Articles 1-21 of the Berne Convention, with the
exception of Article 6bis (which concerns moral rights).
unconditional copyright system, commercially “dead” works are nonetheless

locked up. They cannot be used as building blocks for (potentially valuable)
new works without permission, and the cost of obtaining permission will often
prevent use. In such instances copyright is radically unbalanced: its potential
benefits are depleted, and it therefore imposes only social costs.
Part III of the Article explores how reformalizing copyright might restore
the balance between incentives and access that the old conditional system
maintained. The Article does not, however, argue for unilateral readoption of
old-style formalities by the United States. Such a move would fail because,
among other problems, it would cause the United States to fall out of
compliance with Berne and TRIPs, thereby removing the United States from
the international copyright and trade systems. Part III offers two alternative
paths to reformalization.
The reciprocity principle. The most direct route is to change Berne to
permit—but not require—signatory nations to reformalize their domestic
copyright laws and to apply those formalities to foreign as well as domestic
works. Toward that end, this Article proposes revisions that remove Berne’s
current prohibition of formalities. In place of the previous ban, the revised
Berne Convention would adopt a “reciprocity principle” requiring that all
Berne jurisdictions that impose formalities (1) permit foreign authors to comply
with formalities in their national laws by complying with formalities either in
their home country or in the work’s country of first publication or registration
and (2) adhere to a set of standards set out in Berne that are designed to make
different countries’ formalities “interoperable.”
These relatively small changes to Berne could, if properly implemented,
support a system that allows authors (or publishers) to comply with formalities
that may be imposed in any Berne nation simply by complying with formalities
in their home country. Thus, Berne nations would realize the benefits of
reformalizing their domestic law without creating significant transaction costs
that would deter rightsholders from publishing their works in multiple
jurisdictions.
New-style formalities. It is likely, however, that changes to the current text
of the Berne Convention are not possible in the near term. That should not
cause us to give up on formalities. Rather, that should lead us to ask whether
we can formulate a set of “new-style” formalities that would capture as many
of the benefits of the former system as possible while not depending for their
effectiveness on forfeiture of copyright. If formalities of this type could be
reintroduced into U.S. law, they would nudge our copyright laws back toward
their utilitarian past while preserving our place in the international copyright
system.
Toward that end, this Article proposes a system of formalities that,
although nominally voluntary, are de facto mandatory for any rightsholder
whose work may have commercial value. Noncompliance with the new-style
formalities would subject works to a perpetual and irrevocable “default

license,” with royalties set at a very low level, thus effectively moving works
into the public domain. Although compulsory licenses often are criticized on
the ground that they demand that a price be set for the rights at issue without a
market mechanism, the default licenses that would be implemented in the set of
new-style formalities would not be susceptible to this criticism. Rather than
setting a price for the rights in a copyrighted work, these licenses would merely
establish a threshold—i.e., that the rights were valuable enough to merit the
relatively trivial investment required to comply with formalities.
Such a system of new-style formalities would replicate the important work
that our pre-1976 conditional copyright system was able to do: filtering
commercially valueless works out of copyright and focusing the system on
those works for which it could potentially do some good. Additionally, as we
shall see, it is unlikely that a set of new-style formalities based on default
licenses would run afoul of the antiformalities provision of the Berne
Convention.
I. THE TRADITIONAL CONTOURS OF “CONDITIONAL” COPYRIGHT
A. Formalities in the Early Copyright Statutes
Viewed from the perspective of our current law, where copyright arises the
moment a piece of creative expression is fixed in a tangible medium,18 the
early U.S. copyright laws are remarkable for the variety of hurdles that an
author was made to clear to gain and maintain the protection of the law. The
Copyright Act of 1790,19 the first statute enacted under the authority
established in the Constitution’s Intellectual Property Clause,20 granted rights
only to U.S. authors (and their executors, administrators, and assigns) limited to
the “printing, reprinting, publishing and vending” of their maps, charts, and
books.21 The term of protection was quite short: the term of copyright in the
1790 Act was fourteen years, with a fourteen-year renewal if the author
survived to the end of the initial term.22 Most importantly for present purposes,
the 1790 Act required compliance with a fairly demanding series of formalities,
18. See supra text accompanying note 10.

19. Act of May 31, 1790, ch. 15, 1 Stat. 124 (1790) [hereinafter 1790 Act].
20. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 8. This clause is often referred to as the Patent Clause,
the Copyright Clause, or the Intellectual Property Clause. Although the term “intellectual
property” was unknown at the time of the Constitution’s framing, and although the concept
of intellectual property covers more ground than just patents and copyrights, I have chosen
the third formulation to refer to the congressional power in this clause, because it is the only
formulation that captures both types of exclusive rights authorized in the clause.
21. 1790 Act, supra note 19, § 1. The 1790 Act gave authors no exclusive right to
derivative works, or to public performance or display of their works.
22. Id.
both as a condition precedent to receiving copyright protection and as a

prerequisite to maintaining protection past an initial term.
First, the 1790 Act conditioned protection on the author’s registration of
his work with the clerk’s office of the district court where the author resided.23
The registration condition applied to all works—even those previously
copyrighted under pre-1790 state copyright law. These works were required to
be reregistered in order to gain federal protection.24
Second, within two months thereafter, the author was required to give
notice of his copyright by publishing proof of registration in a newspaper for at
least four weeks.25 In 1802, in an enactment described as “supplementary” to
the 1790 Act, Congress required, in addition to newspaper notice, that any
author seeking to obtain copyright “give information” by marking each copy of
his work with a prescribed copyright notice.26 The statute required the same
proof of registration published in the newspaper notice to be inserted in all
published copies of books “at full length in the title-page or in the page
immediately following the title.”27 Marking according to the prescribed form
was also required on all charts and maps. In all cases, the information required
included the identity and location of the author and the date of copyright.28
Third, the author was required to deposit a copy of the work with the
Secretary of State within six months of publication.29
Fourth, as previously mentioned, a surviving author was permitted to
renew the copyright for an additional fourteen years. Renewal required the
23. Id. § 3.
24. See William J. Maher, Copyright Term, Retrospective Extension, and the Copyright
Law of 1790 in Historical Context, 49 J. COPYRIGHT SOC’Y U.S.A. 1021, 1023 (2002).
Interestingly, Maher’s examination of bibliographic records from the period 1790 to 1800
reveals that only twelve works subject to preexisting state copyright law were reregistered
under the 1790 Act—a tiny fraction (1.74%) of the works registered during that period. Id. at
1025. Moreover, at the time of their reregistration, only three of the works dated from before
1784. Id. Although nine of the twelve states that had copyright laws prior to 1790 required
works to be registered as a condition of protection, most of the state registration records from
this period have been lost, so it is impossible to say how many works were registered under
state copyright and were eligible for reregistration under the 1790 Act. See G. Thomas
Tanselle, Copyright Records and the Bibliographer, 22 STUD. BIBLIOGRAPHY 77, 82-84
(1969). Nonetheless, the very low absolute number of works reregistered following the 1790
Act (i.e., reregistration of works that were previously subject to state copyrights that were
preempted by the 1790 Act) is consistent with much more expansive recent data, discussed
infra at text accompanying notes 124-134, showing that copyrighted works have, on average,
a short commercial life before their value is fully depreciated.
25. 1790 Act, supra note 19, § 3.
26. Act of Apr. 29, 1802, ch. 36, 2 Stat. 171 (1802).
27. Id. § 1.
28. Id.
29. 1790 Act, supra note 19, § 4. Responsibility for accepting registration and deposit
was later moved to the Librarian of Congress. See Act of July 8, 1870, ch. 230, §§ 85, 109-
110, 16 Stat. 198, 212, 215 (1870).
author to reregister the copyright and to publish proof of reregistration in a

newspaper. Both actions were required to be taken within the final six months
of the first term.30
Given the complexity of these formalities, the cost of compliance was not
trivial, and the consequences of noncompliance were severe. Failure to comply
would result in copyright failing to arise (registration), being unenforceable
(notice, deposit), or being subject to early termination, with entry of the work
into the public domain (renewal).
Thus, at its inception the American copyright system required compliance
with a series of formalities that included registration, deposit, and notice via
both marking and published announcement. The system also demanded
reregistration (renewal) as a prerequisite for enjoyment of the full term of
protection—a term which was very short, judged from the perspective of
today’s extended copyright periods.
This emphasis on formalities established in the Founders’ copyright
statutes stayed almost entirely intact through the revisions of the copyright law
enacted in 183131 and 1909.32 The 1831 Act extended the initial term of
copyright to twenty-eight years,33 but kept the registration, deposit, and notice
requirements of the 1790 Act,34 as well as the requirement that copyright
owners renew their copyrights to secure the benefits of a second term.35 In a
supplemental enactment in 1834, Congress strengthened the registration
requirement by requiring, for the purpose of maintaining an accurate record of
copyright ownership, the recordation of “all deeds or instruments in writing for
the transfer or assignment of copyrights.”36 Failure to record a transfer within
sixty days meant that the transfer would be judged “fraudulent and void against
any subsequent purchaser or mortgagee for valuable consideration without
notice.”37
Like the 1831 Act, the 1909 Act retained the registration,38 notice,39 and
renewal40 requirements—though it lengthened the renewal term from fourteen
to twenty-eight years41 and softened the registration requirement somewhat.42
30. 1790 Act, supra note 19, § 1.

31. Act of Feb. 3, 1831, ch. 16, 4 Stat. 436 (1831) [hereinafter 1831 Act].
32. Act of Mar. 4, 1909, ch. 320, 35 Stat. 1075 (1909) (repealed 1976) [hereinafter
1909 Act].
33. 1831 Act, supra note 31, § 16.
34. Id. §§ 3-5.
35. Id. § 2.
36. Act of June 30, 1934, ch. 157, 4 Stat. 728 (1834).
37. Id.
38. 1909 Act, supra note 32, § 1.
39. Id. §§ 1, 19-21.
40. Id. § 24.
41. Id. § 23.
And there copyright came to rest, until its major revision—and the beginning of
the move from conditional to unconditional copyright—in 1976.
B. From Conditional to Unconditional Copyright
Our former conditional copyright regime extended copyright protection

only to those who took affirmative steps to claim copyright protection by
registering their works, marking them with notice of copyright, and renewing
their rights at the end of an initial term. In contrast, our current unconditional
copyright regime grants copyright protection to all “fixed” creative works,
whether or not the author or his assigns takes any affirmative steps to claim
copyright protection. Unconditional copyright grants protection whether or not
the work is registered, marked, or renewed. Protection is automatic and
indiscriminate, regardless of the will of the author or his assigns.
1. Voluntary registration and notice
Of course, formalities have not disappeared entirely: current law relies on

voluntary formalities and offers significant inducements to compliance.
Registration creates a presumption of “constructive notice” that a work is under
copyright,43 which is useful to a plaintiff in an infringement action. More
broadly, registration is a prerequisite to the initiation of an infringement
action,44 at least for works of U.S. origin. (Because a flat ban on enforcement
of an unregistered copyright was believed to violate the Berne Convention,45
there is no registration prerequisite to bringing suit for infringement of a work
of foreign origin.) Current law also limits recovery of statutory damages and
attorney’s fees to instances of infringement occurring after registration46 and
42. The 1909 Act allowed protection to attach upon “publication of the work with the
notice of copyright,” id. § 12, so following 1909 it was publication with notice, rather than
registration, that served as the formality that gave rise to copyright. Following publication,
however, the Act required that the author “promptly” deposit copies of the work with the
Copyright Office, id. § 13, and, although the statute is not clear on this point, Professor
Nimmer has noted that authors were required to submit an application for registration along
with the deposit. 2 NIMMER & NIMMER, supra note 13, § 7.16[A][2][b]. Rightsholders were
barred from bringing a lawsuit for infringement of the copyright until they had complied
with the registration and deposit formalities. 1909 Act, supra note 32, § 12. In addition, the
Register of Copyrights was authorized to make a demand for deposit; failure to promptly
comply (within three months from any part of the United States except for “outlying
territorial possessions,” and within six months from anywhere else) would result in fines and
the voiding of the copyright. Id. § 13.
43. 17 U.S.C. § 410(c) (2000).
44. Id. § 411.
45. See Final Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on U.S. Adherence to the Berne
Convention, 10 COLUM.-VLA J.L. & ARTS 513, 572-73 (1986) [hereinafter Final Report].
46. 17 U.S.C. § 412 (2000).
disallows the defense of innocent infringement for works imprinted with notice
of copyright.47
The law provides a somewhat weaker scheme to incent voluntary
recordation of transfers of copyright ownership—recordation of transfers
creates a presumption of constructive notice but is not a prerequisite to an
infringement action, and failure to record does not limit infringement
damages.48
However substantial these inducements may be for owners of valuable
copyrights who foresee the possibility of infringement litigation, they are not a
replacement for mandatory formalities. The current system of voluntary
formalities creates no incentive for compliance for the large number of
rightsholders who do not expect their works to produce significant revenue. For
these rightsholders, any disadvantage that noncompliance may create in
infringement litigation is irrelevant.
Data on the rate of copyright registration confirms what logic suggests.
Figure 1 graphs the annual number of registrations for the period 1910-2000.49
47. See, e.g., id. § 401(d).

48. Id. § 205(c). The law continues to require deposit, but punishes failure to comply
with a fine, rather than with forfeiture of the copyright. Id. § 407(d).
49. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 236.
FIGURE 1: COPYRIGHT REGISTRATIONS (EXCLUDING RENEWALS),

1910-2000
This graph, which has been taken from a study of U.S. Copyright Office
data by William Landes and Richard Posner, shows that the gross number of
registrations had been increasing sharply from the end of World War I through
1991. After 1991, however, the number of registrations stabilized at a level
approximately twenty percent lower than that reached in 1991, despite very
significant growth in the overall economy between that year and 2000 (a rate of
growth that doubtless was mirrored, if not exceeded, by the increase in the
nation’s “expressive output”).50 The number of registrations should have
continued to grow after 1991, perhaps at an even greater rate than it had in the
prior decades, yet it dropped in 1992 and has failed to increase since.
Some portion of these missing registrations is comprised of authors who,
because they see no realistic prospect of commercial return from their works
and do not foresee infringement litigation, are not moved by the law’s current
inducements to register. Under the pre-1976 conditional copyright system, their
works would have moved immediately into the public domain, where they were
usable without the need to ask permission and could potentially serve as
building blocks for future works that might find commercial success. In our
post-1976 unconditional regime, however, many of these works are effectively
dead. They are copyrighted, and therefore are usable only with permission. But
the cost of obtaining permission is far from trivial. The would-be user first must
50. Id. at 235.

locate a rightsholder, and then negotiate for rights. The cost of negotiating a
license may be high when neither the licensor nor the licensee has any
information from other market transactions that would help establish the value
of a license. But many would-be users will never get to the negotiation stage:
the cost of identifying rightsholders, without the benefit of a registry, and often
without any reliable indication of current ownership from the work itself (either
because the work is not marked with notice or because rights have been
transferred without recordation), will often be enough to deter the use.
Perhaps the best illustration of the difficulties users face in identifying
rightsholders is the admission of the major record companies in the Napster
litigation that they were unable to produce a complete list of the copyrighted
works they claimed to own.51 Similarly, a visit to the website of the Harry Fox
Agency, the organization set up by the music publishing industry to administer
the collective licensing of musical copyrights, reveals that the agency has lost
track of hundreds of music publishing companies to whom it may owe
royalties.52 If record companies and the music publishing industry’s own
licensing agency are unable to quickly and cheaply identify the rightsholders to
whom they should be sending royalty checks, the overall cost to users of doing
so, especially in the case of works that are not commercially successful, is
likely to be substantial.
Indeed, it is not surprising that the record companies apparently invest so
little in maintaining careful records; many of the works that they own are worth
too little, in terms of expected future revenues, to merit the expense required to
keep track of them. The situation in books is probably worse: a study by Jason
Schultz of data in annual book catalogs suggests that only a tiny fraction of the
total number of books ever published is still in print—“for example, of 10,027
books published in the U.S. in 1930, only 174 [i.e., 1.7%] were still in print in
2001.”53 Publishing companies with enormous back-catalogs of out-of-print
books may find that the cost of negotiating licenses for many uses outweighs
expected revenues. Their back-catalogs are, therefore, effectively dead.
In sum, the transaction costs imposed by a system of unconditional
copyright prevent many uses that may otherwise have been made. For
unregistered works—and probably for many registered works as well54—the
current system imposes costs without producing countervailing benefits in the
form of revenues to rightsholders.
51. See A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 114 F. Supp. 2d 896, 925 (N.D. Cal.
2000) (recounting record companies’ contention that “it would be burdensome or even
impossible to identify all of the copyrighted music they own”), aff’d in part, rev’d in part,
239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001).
52. See Harry Fox Agency, Inc., HFA Is Looking for These Publishers, at
http://harryfox.com/public/infoUpdateList.jsp (last visited Oct. 30, 2004).
53. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 212 (explaining results of study).
54. See infra p. 501.
2. Renewal
Unlike registration and notice, which live on as ghosts, the renewal term is
well and truly dead. Under current law, all works dating from 1978 or later are
protected for a “unified” term, which is currently set for individual works at life
of the author plus seventy years, and for corporate and anonymous works at
ninety-five years.55
FIGURE 2: COPYRIGHT RENEWALS, 1910-2000
55. 17 U.S.C. §§ 302-304 (2000 & Supp. II 2002).

FIGURE 3: RATE OF COPYRIGHT RENEWAL, 1910-2000
Figure 2 graphs the annual number of copyright renewals for the period
1910-2000; Figure 3 graphs the annual rate of copyright renewal—i.e., the
number of renewals each year as a percentage of the total number of works for
which the initial term was due to expire.56 Both graphs show what one would
expect: after renewal for pre-1978 works became automatic in 1992,57 both the
total number of renewals and the rate of renewal plummeted.58
56. These graphs are, like Figure 1, drawn from LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at
236, and are based on Copyright Office data collected by those authors.
57. CAA, supra note 8, § 102.
58. That renewals did not fall to zero is due to provisions of the North American Free
Trade Agreement Implementation Act, Pub. L. No. 103-182, 107 Stat. 2057 (1993), and the
Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) § 514, Pub. L. No. 103-465, 108 Stat. 4809, 4976
(1994), which together restored the copyright of certain foreign works that had fallen into the
public domain for failure to comply with mandatory formalities. These foreign works are
restored “for the remainder of the term of copyright that the work would have otherwise
been granted in the United States if the work never entered the public domain in the United
States.” 17 U.S.C. § 104A(a)(1)(B) (2000).
II. FORMALITIES AND THE “TRADITIONAL CONTOURS” OF

CONDITIONAL COPYRIGHT
A. Recording Ownership
To understand the role that formalities have traditionally played in

copyright law, and the consequences of our move from conditional to
unconditional copyright, it is helpful to think about formalities as they function
in a different and perhaps more familiar context: real property.
When you buy a house, you record the transfer of title. You do so because
the law requires you to, but if you take a moment to think about the reasons for
the law, you will probably grasp fairly quickly that compliance is in your best
interest. By recording your title, you will be able to prove your ownership when
you eventually wish to sell the house. Indeed, you were probably only willing
to buy it in the first place—and were able to convince the bank to grant you a
mortgage—because you were able to confirm, through a title search, that the
person who sold it to you actually held valid title and therefore had the right to
convey the property.
In the case of real estate transactions, records of ownership are ordinarily
maintained by local governments. The requirement that title be recorded is a
form of government regulation, but no one complains, in this particular context,
that government is interfering in the “free market” for real estate. For most
people, their house is their biggest investment. Many would not be willing to
make that investment without a clear record that the seller actually owns the
house offered for sale. In this case, a regulatory scheme that creates a
centralized record of ownership is a rational response to a fundamental
characteristic of real estate—its expense, which makes would-be buyers uneasy
unless ownership is transparent.
Formalities played an analogous role of recording ownership for the
intangible form of property in literary and artistic works that we refer to as
copyright. While the U.S. Copyright Office, which maintains the copyright
registry, has never succeeded in making it as reliable or as easy to search as a
typical real estate title registry, it was nonetheless the case that, back when
registration was mandatory, the copyright registry allowed many would-be
users of a creative work to determine quickly and inexpensively whether the
work in question was indeed subject to copyright, and, if so, from whom to
seek a license.
As in the case of real estate, formalities have been implemented in the
copyright context because they address a special characteristic of the particular
type of property at issue. The property interest protected by copyright is
intangible—unlike real estate or personal property, the property embodied in
copyright has no unique physical existence. A painting, a book, a compact disc
containing an audio recording: all are physical objects, but the expression fixed
in each of them may, absent the workings of the law, freely be copied and
ownership of copies transferred. Therefore, although the question of who owns
a particular copy of a book presents no more difficulty than does ownership of
any particular piece of personal property, the question of who owns rights in
the expression contained in the book most often cannot be answered simply by
understanding who owns the book. The registration, notice, and recordation
formalities created the information about ownership that mere possession of a
copyrighted work could not.
1. “Signaling”
Ownership in the copyright context may be less transparent than in the case
of personal or real property, but the question of ownership is nonetheless a very
important one to our copyright system for at least two reasons. The first is that
the rights granted by the copyright laws are, unlike rights in most other forms
of property, temporary. Of the various limitations that the Constitution’s
Intellectual Property Clause imposes on Congress’s power to grant copyrights
and patents, none is more visible than the dictate that exclusive rights may be
granted only for “limited times.” This limitation, and others in the clause, are
designed to balance the need to give authors and artists incentives to create
with the equally important imperative, in a society committed to free
expression, that public access to creative works not be impeded by government-
granted monopoly. So the author (or his assign) is given a period of exclusive
ownership during which he is free to profit from his work to whatever extent
his exclusive right will allow. At the end of this period, however, the work
remits to the public, making it available as the raw material for future acts of
creativity.
Of course, if this balancing act is to work, would-be users need to know
when ownership of a copyrighted work began and when it will end. By creating
information about ownership and the term of protection—both at the inception
of copyright (registration, notice), and later (recordation, renewal)—copyright
formalities fulfilled the important function of signaling that works had moved
from the private market to the public domain. As such, formalities were
important in ensuring that the “limited times” requirement was operative at the
level of individual works.
2. Maximizing private incentives
Ownership is also important for reasons that have to do not so much with
maintaining the copyright balance, but with fully realizing the first element of
that balance—i.e., copyright’s role in spurring creation of new works. Often,
copyright owners profit by allowing others to exploit their works through
licensing arrangements. Indeed, because exploitation of creative works often
requires significant investment that authors may be ill-placed to undertake,

licensing is a crucial mechanism for transferring rights from authors to those
entities—such as film studios, book publishers, and record companies—best
able to exploit them.
Because licensing is efficient, intellectual property policy generally seeks
to encourage it. Of course, licensing will be more prevalent if the transaction
costs of negotiating a license are low; historically, copyright formalities helped
to lower the transaction costs of licensing. They did so by creating information
about ownership and the term of protection, which simplified the process of
identifying licensors and also clarified the length of the term of exclusive
ownership that would be the subject of a license.
B. Formalities as a Copyright “Filter”
Formalities constructed a record of ownership, but they served another,

arguably even more important, function: allowing authors and artists to
distinguish between works for which they desired copyright protection and
those for which they did not. Formalities performed this “filtering” function in
two ways.
1. Registration and notice
Until the 1976 Act, the registration and notice requirements served as
initial conditions for which noncompliance meant copyright either did not arise
or was unenforceable. Although these initial obligations were easily satisfied,
many published works were neither registered nor marked with copyright
notice, indicating that the authors did not desire the protection that the
copyright laws would otherwise provide—i.e., that they did not project a net
present value for royalty revenue from their work that exceeded the relatively
trivial costs of complying with the formalities. Thus the registration and notice
formalities imposed an initial filter separating works with significant potential
commercial value for which authors desired protection from other works for
which protection was irrelevant. The latter class of works moved immediately
into the public domain, where it was freely usable by others (most importantly
as the building material for new works) without fee or the need to ask
permission. Furthermore, because of the notice formality, the public domain
status of many works was readily recognizable under the pre-1976 rules, even
without the need to consult a registry.
How important was this initial filter? In an age where a popular book or
record can return many millions of dollars for its copyright owner, it may be
difficult to understand why any creator would fail to comply with inexpensive
and relatively simple formalities and allow a work eligible for copyright to fall
into the public domain. But there are hints in the historical record suggesting
that noncompliance was common. This next section looks at the available
historical data and attempts to quantify the effect of the initial filter.
Data on the effect of the registration formality: 1790-1870. Prior to the
1976 Act, all unpublished material was subject to perpetual common law
copyright. The relevant question, then, is what percentage of published material
was registered and made subject to copyright. The fact that a particular work
was published suggests that it had some value, and one would assume that a
relatively significant percentage of published works would be registered for the
purpose of gaining protection under federal copyright. Yet a 1987 study by
James Gilreath and Elizabeth Carter Wills of records assembled by the Library
of Congress found that of the more than 15,000 maps, charts, and books
(including pamphlets) that were published in the United States between 1790
and 1800, only 779 were registered and thus protected by copyright—a
registration rate of approximately 5%.59 William Maher, in a recent
reexamination of the Gilreath/Wills study, finds that the earlier study made
several errors that inflated the registration rate. Maher’s recalculation, using
more complete bibliographic materials, suggests that the registration rate during
that early period was even lower—3.28%.60
The Gilreath/Wills and Maher studies may both understate the rate of
registration. Both studies count some published works from this period that
were of foreign origin, and thus not eligible for protection under the 1790 Act.
And neither study accounts for the loss of some early copyright records.61 But
even if the Gilreath/Wills and Maher studies offer only rough approximations,
they suggest that a small percentage—probably at most only between 10% and
20% of works eligible for copyright protection—were registered in the decade
following the 1790 Act.62
59. See James Gilreath, Editor’s Preface to FEDERAL COPYRIGHT RECORDS 1790-1800,
at ix, ix (James Gilreath ed. & Elizabeth Carter Wills compiler, 1987).
60. See Maher, supra note 24, at 1024 n.8. Using additional information obtained from
ROGER BRISTOL, SUPPLEMENT TO CHARLES EVANS’ AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY (1970), about
the number of works published in the United States, and correcting for duplicate copyright
registrations in Gilreath’s records, Maher arrives at a larger number of published works
(20,829) and a smaller number of copyright registrations (684).
61. Gilreath, supra note 59, at ix; Maher, supra note 24, at 1023-27. Further, in relying
on the number of total texts found in CHARLES EVANS, AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY (1941),
Maher is repeating some instances where Evans double-counted and included foreign texts.
The recent online version of American Bibliography (available at
http://infoweb.newsbank.com to users with a password), which includes the supplement to
American Bibliography (a password-protected description of which is available at
http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_action=help), provides a lower total
number for texts produced in 1790-1800 (12,303) than Maher’s.
62. There is some anecdotal evidence that the percentage of published works subject to
copyright remained low, although probably not as low as at copyright’s inception. In a 1961
report to Congress, the Register of Copyrights stated that “most of the great mass of
published material” did not bear a copyright notice, indicating that many authors were
I could not find any existing study that calculates a rate of copyright
registration for any period following 1800. I therefore attempted my own post-
1800 calculation. What follows is a study of data regarding the registration rate
through 1870, which is the latest date for which data exists allowing estimates
of both total copyright registrations (the numerator in my calculation) and total
published copyrightable works (the denominator).63
Construction of both the numerator and the denominator posed significant
difficulties. First, for the period between 1790 and 1870, only the copyright
registrations for 1790 through 1800 have been indexed and published.64
Though catalogued, the registrations for 1800 through 1870 have not been
precisely quantified, subdivided by type or date, or published.65 Compounding
the challenge, over the period in question (1801-1870), imprints (1803), music
(1831), and photographs (1865) were added to the types of items that could be
copyrighted.
What I did have was a well-regarded estimate of 150,000 for total
registrations for the period between 1790 and 1870.66 This number may be too
low, because some records have been lost, or too high, because not all
copyrighted items were actually published.67 Given an inability to correct for
these factors, and given that they are likely to be relatively small and at least
partially offsetting, we will use 149,221 as our numerator—150,000 total
registrations for 1790 through 1870, minus 779 registrations for 1790 through
1800—in our attempt to quantify the impact of the registration requirement for
the period from 1801 through 1870.
simply not interested in securing copyright at all. HOUSE COMM. ON THE JUDICIARY, 87TH
CONG., REPORT OF THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS ON THE GENERAL REVISION OF THE U.S.
COPYRIGHT LAW 62 (Comm. Print 1961); see also H.R. REP. NO. 94-1476, at 143 (1976)
(explaining that the copyright notice requirement serves four principal functions: “(1) It has
the effect of placing in the public domain a substantial body of published material that no
one is interested in copyrighting; (2) It informs the public as to whether a particular work is
copyrighted; (3) It identifies the copyright owner; and (4) It shows the date of publication.”).
63. I received invaluable assistance from Joe Gratz and Darien Shanske in conducting
historical research for this Article. Though the discussion of our findings makes reference to
the author in the singular, this stylistic convention is adopted to ensure clarity and ease of
reading, and not to suggest that the author conducted the research independently.
64. This was done in FEDERAL COPYRIGHT RECORDS 1790-1800, supra note 59.
65. See ALICE D. SCHREYER, THE HISTORY OF BOOKS: A GUIDE TO SELECTED
RESOURCES IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 94 (1987).
66. The estimate is from Martin A. Roberts, Records in the Copyright Office of the
Library of Congress Deposited by the United States District Courts, 1790-1870, 31 PROC.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOC’Y AM. 81, 94 (1937). It is cited as authoritative by SCHREYER, supra
note 65, at 90; see also U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, 106TH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE REGISTER OF
COPYRIGHTS FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2003, at 62 n.1 (2003); Tanselle,
supra note 24.
67. Roberts, supra note 66, at 87, 92.
Calculation of the denominator—total published works between 1801 and

1870—is more complex. The period from 1790 to 1800 lent itself to
quantification for two principal reasons: first, because of the existence of a
well-respected source for total imprints, Evans’s American Bibliography, and
second, because only maps, charts, and books could be copyrighted. The Evans
bibliographic collection was continued only through 1846.68 Though there is a
credible source for total copyrightable music titles produced in our period (i.e.,
1831, when music became copyrightable, through 1870),69 I could not find
comparable sources for prints, maps, or photographs. Still, even taking the data
we do have, the impact of the registration requirement appears considerable:
from 1801 through 1870 we have records of 196,683 imprints and an estimate
of 163,500 music titles, as compared to 149,221 total registrations, or 41.43%
of published works being copyrighted. Thus, for the first seventy years of the
nineteenth century, the data suggests that less than half of all published works
were copyrighted.70
However, there are several areas of uncertainty that might cause this
percentage to be incorrect. First, there are several potentially significant factors
that make the 41.43% figure appear likely to be too high. Most obviously,
because we only have a number for imprints through 1846, the denominator is
almost certainly too small. There are several ways to correct for this data
deficiency. Simply continuing the number of imprints recorded annually from
1847 through 1870 at the same level of production as 1846 gives a total of
383,475 imprints, making the percentage copyrighted drop to 27.28%.
Continuing the trend in text production in this way is very conservative, given
what we know about the growth of the publishing industry at this time71 and
68. For 1801 through 1819, there is AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY: A PRELIMINARY

CHECKLIST (Ralph R. Shaw & Richard H. Shoemaker compilers, 1958). For 1819 through
1846, there is A CHECKLIST OF AMERICAN IMPRINTS (Richard H. Shoemaker et al. compilers,
1964).
69. D.W. Krummel, Counting Every Star; or, Historical Statistics on Music Publishing
in the United States, 10 ANUARIO INTERAMERICANO DE INVESTIGACION MUSICAL 175, 182
(1974).
70. Because this figure includes some registrations for prints, maps, and photographs in
the numerator, but does not include any provision for these works in the denominator, it
overstates the rate of registration by some unknown, but likely small, amount.
71. The period between 1845 and 1857 is described as “the greatest boom the business
had ever witnessed.” 1 JOHN TEBBEL, A HISTORY OF PUBLISHING IN THE UNITED STATES 245
(1972). Between 1850 and 1870, the total value of all printing and publishing in the United
States increased from $14,812,227 to $80,939,756. Downing Palmer O’Harra, Book
Publishing in the United States 1860 to 1901, Including Statistical Tables and Charts to
1927, at 112 (1928) (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Illinois) (on file with author)
(citing the 1905, 1914, 1921, and 1925 editions of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Census of
Manufactures). Though these raw figures do not account for inflation and, as noted by
O’Harra, collection methods probably improved over the period (further inflating the total
growth), id. at 111, the overall trend is clear.
how much both population and GDP grew over this period—the latter made
especially significant by the extent to which the data recorded by Evans and his
successors tracks growth in both GDP and population. If instead of our
assumption of no growth in annual text production, we correlate the annual
production of texts with growth in population, then total texts leaps to 468,956,
and the percentage copyrighted falls further to 23.59%; if tied to GDP growth,
total texts would be 514,350, and the percentage copyrighted falls still further
to 22.01%.
FIGURE 4: TOTAL TEXT PRODUCTION AND U.S. POPULATION

GROWTH72
Titles Produced - Population in Millions

Cumulative
600,000 39.91 million 40
Data for texts is an

estimate past 1846.
35
500,000 481,259 texts
30
400,000 Total Texts if Texts Grow with

Population
25
Total Texts - Flat Lined After 1846
395,778 texts
Population
20.79 million in 1846
300,000 20
15
208,986 texts in 1846
200,000
10
100,000
5
90
94
98
02
06
10
14
18
22
26
30
34
38
42
46
50
54
58
62
66
70
17
17
17
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
Year
72. For information on texts, see A CHECKLIST OF AMERICAN IMPRINTS, supra note 68;
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY: A PRELIMINARY CHECKLIST, supra note 68; EVANS, supra note
61. For population and GDP information, see Louis D. Johnston & Samuel H. Williamson,
Source Note for US GDP, 1789-2002 (2003), at http://www.eh.net/hmit/gdp/GDPsource.htm
(last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
FIGURE 5: TOTAL TEXT PRODUCTION AND U.S. GDP GROWTH73
Texts Produced - GDP in Billions -

Cumulative Cumumlative
600,000 $100
96.93 billion
$90
526,653 texts
500,000
Data for texts is an $80
estimate past 1846.
$70
400,000
395,778 texts
$60
Total Texts Produced If Texts Increase
With GDP
300,000 $50
Total Texts - Flat Lined After 1846
39.92 billion
Real GDP $40

208,986 texts
200,000
$30
$20
100,000
$10
$0
90 94 98 0 2 06 10 14 18 22 2 6 30 34 38 42 4 6 50 54 58 62 66 7 0
17 17 17 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18
Year
It is important to note that one cannot assume that Evans’s successor

collections actually succeeded in cataloging all imprints for 1790 through 1846;
it is almost certainly the case that those collections undercounted significantly,
especially for more ephemeral items like pamphlets. I have not found an
estimate of the likely undercount, but it may be considerable. For example,
Clarence Brigham’s survey of extant booksellers’ catalogs identifies twenty-
five out of sixty-seven total that were not included by Evans, a 37%
undercount.74 The tendency for the bibliographic references to undercount
would understate the denominator of our calculation and thus artificially inflate
the estimate of the percentage of published works copyrighted.
The denominator would increase even more dramatically (and the
percentage of works copyrighted would drop further) if there were a way of
calculating the total number of copyrightable items within a periodical, since
authors were required to secure the copyrights for their articles before
publication, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., learned to his dismay.75 In general,
the numbers we have for periodicals in these collections undercount even the
73. The information regarding U.S. GDP in Figure 5 comes from Johnston &
Williamson, supra note 72.
74. Clarence Brigham, American Booksellers’ Catalogues, 1734-1800, in ESSAYS
HONORING LAWRENCE C. WROTH 31 (1951).
75. See Mifflin v. R.H. White Co., 190 U.S. 260 (1903); Holmes v. Hurst, 174 U.S. 82
(1899).
titles of periodicals, let alone the articles within them.76 There were
approximately 1200 American newspapers in 1833 and 3000 in 1860.77 As for
periodicals, there were a few hundred in 1833 and more than a thousand in
1860.78 Since there were no periodicals counted in the bibliographic collection
for 1820 through 1846, these copyrightable items are not taken into account in
the measure of the number of total imprints (i.e., in the denominator of our
calculation).79 To give some perspective of the undercount, if there were as few
as a thousand periodicals published per year on average between 1820 and
1870, and if each of these periodicals contained two copyrightable articles per
year, then periodicals alone would have accounted for all of the 150,000
copyright registrations between 1790 and 1870.
We might expect another potentially large increase in the denominator (i.e.,
another large drop in the percentage of works copyrighted) if we were able to
reliably count copyrightable commercial work product (such as labels)
produced during the relevant period. These works were copyrightable from
1803 and clearly were registered and deposited in significant enough numbers
to arouse indignation in the Librarian of Congress.80 In 1873 there were 2520
prints deposited, which shows a general awareness that these objects could be
copyrighted, but this is likely a small portion of the total output of these works
in that year, considering the country’s population was then already 43 million,
with an economy of $119 billion.
There are also factors that would tend to decrease the denominator and thus
increase our estimate of the percentage of works that were copyrighted. Evans
and his successors included government publications in their lists, which were
not copyrightable. More significantly, works by foreign authors were not
copyrightable until after 1890, and these works comprised a large portion of
American production. Here, too, there is no hard data, but there is a clear
overall trend, namely toward a majority of works being written by American
76. Evans lists newspapers and periodicals once for each year of publication, while
Shaw and Shoemaker (1801-1819) list them only once and Shoemaker et al. (1820-1846) do
not list periodicals at all. See A CHECKLIST OF AMERICAN IMPRINTS, supra note 68, at v;
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY: A PRELIMINARY CHECKLIST, supra note 68, at ix.
77. FRANK LUTHER MOTT, AMERICAN JOURNALISM 216 (rev. ed. 1950).
78. Id. Another source puts the total number of American periodicals in 1872 (just after
the end of our period) at 8110. M.B. Iwinski, La Statistique Internationale Des Imprimés,
BULLETIN DE L’INSTITUT INTERNATIONAL DE BIBLIOGRAPHIE 1, 66 (1911).
79. See A CHECKLIST OF AMERICAN IMPRINTS, supra note 68, at v.
80. Specifically, the Librarian complained in 1872 about the deposit of “printed labels,
with or without pictorial embellishment, designed for use on cigar-boxes, patent medicines,
and other articles of manufacture.” ANNUAL REPORT OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS
EXHIBITING PROGRESS OF THE LIBRARY DURING YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 1, 1872, at 4 (1872).
This is confirmed by Roberts, who attests to seeing records of “patent medicine labels, cigar-
box linings, photographs, and all the other miscellanea which the copyright laws were called
to protect.” Roberts, supra note 66, at 92; see also Tanselle, supra note 24, at 86.
authors by the 1840s.81 An assumption that 50% of total texts were of foreign
origin is conservative, as that figure is not only at the upper end of
contemporary estimates, but also does not take into account that a
disproportionately large percentage of the total number of texts in the
denominator were produced in the final two decades of the period in question—
i.e., at a time when works by American authors comprised the majority of
works published in the United States. A brief inspection of the three
bibliographic collections suggests—although an exact identification of all
foreign works is impossible from the data provided—that foreign authors do
not make up nearly half of the works recorded.82 I have not found any similar
estimates of the percentage of music publication that was the work of
foreigners. Even discounting the total number of titles (both texts and music)
by 50% and using the most conservative method for calculating the number of
imprints between 1846 and 1870 (i.e., the flatline method), 54.56%, or just
81. One contemporary source put the percentage of foreign works and reprints at 45%
between 1830 and 1842 and 30% in 1853. NIKELUS TRÜBNER, TRÜBNER’S BIBLIOGRAPHIC
GUIDE TO AMERICAN LITERATURE, at xxiii-iv (1855). Trübner’s numbers for 1853 are cited
without comment by Tebbel. 2 TEBBEL, supra note 71, at 23. Another contemporary source
puts the percentage of foreign works in 1835 at about 40%; however, this source also states
that in 1833 there were “one-third more foreign than original” books. ROSALIND REMER,
PRINTERS AND MEN OF CAPITAL 149 (1996) (citing 2 BOOKSELLER’S ADVERTISER AND
MONTHLY REGISTER OF NEW PUBLICATIONS AMERICAN AND FOREIGN 2 (1836)). Another
contemporary source for the 1850s also apparently confirmed Trübner, finding percentages
of original American titles to be roughly 61%, 58%, and 73% for the years 1853, 1854, and
1855, respectively. See CLARENCE GOHDES, AMERICAN LITERATURE IN NINETEENTH-
CENTURY ENGLAND 42 n.66 (1944) (citing SAMPSON LOW, THE AMERICAN CATALOGUE OF
BOOKS vi (1856)). Certainly the trend was toward American authors; Tebbel summarizes as
follows:
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the steady swing away from British to
American authors, notwithstanding the immense popularity of Scott and Dickens. In 1820,
the ratio had been thirty American to seventy British; in 1856, it was eighty American to
twenty British. While these figures may not be quite accurate, they disclose the trend
unmistakably.
1 TEBBEL, supra note 71, at 221. Tebbel follows another contemporary source here,
Goodrich, who states that the balance shifted toward American authors in the 1840s. 2 S.G.
GOODRICH, RECOLLECTIONS OF A LIFETIME 389 (1856); see also Aubert J. Clark, The
Movement for Intellectual Copyright in Nineteenth Century America 38-39 (1960)
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America) (on file with author)
(doubting that the percentage of American bestsellers that were pirated between 1800 and
1860 was as high as 50%). For the years 1890 through 1916, books by foreigners averaged
44% (for the twenty years that complete information was collected). 2 TEBBEL, supra note
71, at 710 (citing FRED E. WOODWARD, A GRAPHIC SURVEY OF BOOK PUBLICATION, 1890-
1916 (U.S. Bureau of Educ., Bulletin No. 14, 1917)).
82. This was also confirmed by my inspection of all the California imprints calalogued
in Robert Harlan, Printing for the Instant City: San Francisco at Mid-Century, in GETTING
THE BOOKS OUT 137 (Michael Hackenberg ed., 1985). Only around one percent were of
foreign origin. No doubt this number is lower than the number nationwide, as San Francisco
publishers were clearly focused on providing works of local interest and many reprints
appeared within periodicals.
more than one in two copyrightable works, were actually copyrighted for the
period 1801 through 1870.
Examination of specialized collections. This global estimate is
corroborated by evidence drawn from specialized bibliographic collections
from the end of our period. Almost two decades ago, Professor Robert Harlan
assembled and analyzed a uniquely comprehensive collection of 2571 works
published in San Francisco from 1850 through 1870.83 He found that the San
Francisco publishing industry, in a period when the book publishing industry
was much more advanced than it was for much of our broader 1801-1870 time
frame, produced 632 books (defined as works over forty-nine pages), 202
broadsheets, and 1737 pamphlets and other ephemera.84 Harlan has notes for
2053 of these works, recording whether individual works bore copyright notice.
Harlan found that only 13.48% of these published and copyrightable texts were
copyright noticed.85 The percentage is higher for certain categories, such as
collections of laws and cases (86.05%), almanacs and directories (74.42%), and
books generally (56.34%). Of all remaining items, i.e., texts of forty-nine pages
or less, only 3.95% were copyright noticed.
A review of some of the works studied by Harlan found that the works not
copyright noticed were neither all ephemeral nor obviously different from or of
less value (either commercial or cultural) than the works that were noticed. For
example, A Practical Illustration of the Movements of Hurricanes, with Plain
Directions How They May Be Avoided (eight pages, with diagrams, 1862) was
not copyright noticed, while The Law of Storms: The Various Phenomena by
Which Their Approach Can Be Ascertained with Certainty, and Practical
Directions to Mariners for the Avoidance of Their Fury (nineteen pages, 1869)
was noticed. The Miners’ Own Book: Containing Correct Illustrations and
Descriptions of the Various Modes of California Mining, Including All the
Improvements Introduced from the Earliest Day to the Present Time (thirty-two
83. Statistics provided by Professor Robert Harlan (July 28, 2004) (results of study
examining San Francisco imprints from 1850 through 1870) (on file with author).
84. Harlan, supra note 82, at 154. Harlan adds that he doubts as many as one in four
examples of job work (e.g., labels) published in San Francisco during the period has
survived, even though the number of ephemera in his collection outnumbers books by over
three to one. Id. at 145. The copyright registration records for California for the period 1851
through 1862 are available; these records indicate that only about 56% of all the works
copyrighted in California for this period (293 items) were texts. CALIFORNIA IMPRINTS, 1833-
1862, A BIBLIOGRAPHY 480-504 (Robert Greenwood ed., Seiko June Suzuki & Marjorie
Pulliam compilers, 1961). Examples of job work copyrighted include labels for the “Eureka
Compound for Fever & Ague” (1852) and “Fish’s Infallible Hair Restorative” (1861), and a
blank of a membership certificate from the Committee of Vigilance for San Francisco
(1856). So a substantial amount of copyrightable work most likely has been lost and cannot
be counted in the denominator of any registration rate calculation.
85. The percentage reflects 198 copyrighted items out of 1469 total copyrightable
items. The figure for total copyrightable material is probably too low, as it was reached using
very strict criteria to determine which items would have been copyrightable.
pages, 1858) and Sketches of the Washoe Silver Mines (twenty-four pages,
1860) were not copyright noticed,86 but Guide to the Colorado Mines (sixteen
pages, including map, 1863) was noticed.
Most sermons were not copyright noticed, but liberal cleric Laurentine
Hamilton, founder of the Hamilton Free Church,87 did notice his sermons.88
Joseph Josselyn, M.D., did not notice his medical work “Man, Know Thyself!”:
A Treatise upon Sexual and Other Diseases (forty-seven pages, 1866), while
the California Illustrated Family Medical Almanac was noticed and registered
(1858). Not all works on law are copyright noticed. For example, James
William Shaw’s pamphlet Land Titles in San Francisco (sixteen pages, 1862)
was not noticed. Useful educational tools, though also often copyrighted, were
not always. For instance, Bernhard Marks’s textbook Normal Tract on
Numeration and Notation (fifteen pages, 1869), was noticed; John Martin
Spalding’s more polemical Common Schools in the United States Compared
with Those in Europe: Being a Review of the Work of Joseph Kay, Esq., on the
Results of Primary Schools in Different European Countries (thirty-two pages,
1860) was not noticed.89
Interestingly, in examining Harlan’s data, I found several works that had
been copyright noticed between 1851 and 1862 but were not recorded in the
transcribed copyright records discussed above.90 Harlan found the same
phenomenon occurring when he examined the output of one of the major
California publishers of this period, the Anton Roman firm. Of the sixty-five
works Roman published from 1860 through 1870, forty-five, or 69% of the
total, were copyright noticed, but of these Harlan could find only twenty-six, or
86. Interestingly, DeGroot’s map of the Washoe Mines was registered (item #203,
1860).
87. For background information on Laurentine Hamilton, see First Unitarian Church of
Oakland, Welcome to the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, at
http://uuoakland.org/history.htm (last visited Oct. 31, 2004).
88. Charles Wadsworth, for instance, did not notice his many sermons when published
as pamphlets, but his publisher, Anton Roman, did notice a collection of his sermons even
though at least two (and probably most, if not all) of the sermons in the collection had
already been published as pamphlets and were thus in the public domain.
89. A 1963 Practicing Law Institute monograph on copyright law by Barbara Ringer
and Paul Gitlin was published without notice and immediately entered the public domain.
See BARBARA A. RINGER & PAUL GITLIN, COPYRIGHTS (1963). Ringer was perhaps the
person most familiar with copyright formalities at that time; when the book was published,
she was Assistant Register for Examining at the U.S. Copyright Office. (She would later
serve as Register of Copyrights between 1973 and 1980.) It is exceedingly unlikely that the
chief examiner for the Copyright Office responsible for enforcing the notice formality
mistakenly omitted notice from her own monograph on copyright law, and it is likely that
many other such omissions were deliberate.
90. For example, the Marysville Directory for the Year 1855 is copyright noticed, but
not registered, even though the same publisher’s Directory for Sacramento for 1853-54 is
registered. Also, LEWIS SHEARER, A DIGEST OF THE DECISIONS AND OPINIONS OF THE
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA (1859) is noticed, but not registered.
40% of the total, actually registered in the records now at the Library of
Congress.91 So Roman apparently was making decisions not only regarding
which works to copyright notice, but regarding which should be actually
registered.
For the period after the centralization of copyright records in the Library of
Congress, there is definitive information on the total number of copyright
registrations by type. Unfortunately, because of the lack of bibliographic
studies, calculating total production of copyrightable items after 1846 becomes
impossible. Yet strong indications remain of the continued impact of the
registration requirement after 1846, even in an increasingly commercial
society. I conducted a survey of the holdings of the Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley, for San Francisco publications for the year
1908 and found that 20.95% of works were copyrighted, with a significantly
higher percentage of books copyrighted (34.09%) and a much smaller
percentage of the remaining, more ephemeral items copyrighted (11.48%).92
Though the San Francisco publishing industry declined considerably after
1870,93 the works that were published, including those not copyrighted, could
be of considerable political—especially local political—importance. For
instance, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the United States:
A Statement from the Chinese in America by Poon Chew Ng (fifteen pages),
Shame of the Relief; Being an Expose of the Disgraceful Methods of the Relief
Committee During the Dark Days Following San Francisco’s Great Disaster
by Mary Kelly (fifteen pages), and In the Shadow of the Gallows, an Innocent
Man Condemned to Die: Resume of the Case of William Buckley, Who Will Die
91. Statistics provided by Professor Robert Harlan (July 28, 2004) (on file with
author). There are some more suggestive examples from Harlan’s data of individuals making
decisions regarding which works to notice. The California Immigrant Union copyright
noticed its informational work entitled All About California, and the Inducements to Settle
There (seventy-four pages, 1870), but not its political works, such as Arguments in Favor of
Immigration with an Explanation of the Measures Recommended by the Immigrant Union
(twenty-six pages, 1870) or Common Sense Applied to the Immigrant Question: Showing
Why the “California Immigrant Union” was Founded and What It Expects to Do (sixty-four
pages, 1869). Jacob Leon Stone does not notice his Reply to Bishop Colenso’s Attack upon
the Pentateuch (one hundred eleven pages, 1863), but does notice Slavery and the Bible; or
Slavery as Seen in its Punishment (forty-eight pages, 1863). In general, political statements
were not noticed, which makes sense, since often the whole point was to publicize a point of
view, often unpopular, such as George C. Bates’s published speech entitled, Address of Geo.
C. Bates, Esq., Which He Was Prevented from Delivering at Sacramento, on Saturday, April
19th, 1856, by a Mob.
92. For this survey I compared the records of the Bancroft Library with the published
copyright records for 1908.
93. Harlan, supra note 82, at 162. This sample is much thinner, with a total of 105
copyrightable items.
on the Gallows Unless Governor Gillett Interferes by Frank J. Murphy (fifty-

six pages) were not copyrighted.94
I also conducted a survey of the poster collection of the Hoover Institution
Archives at Stanford University. The posters collected tended overwhelmingly
to concern political issues. Of all the posters in the collection from before 1976
(a total of 5756), less than a third, at the most, were copyrighted.95
Copyright office data. Although it cannot alone quantify the rate of
registration, Copyright Office data on the annual number of copyright
registrations does suggest that the rate of registration is responsive to relatively
small changes in registration fees. This suggests, in turn, that many authors do
not project a significant net present value for their works, and consequently
place a low value on copyright protection.
Referring back to Figure 1, which graphs the annual number of
registrations for the period from 1910 to 2000, the data shows that registrations
more than quintupled during this period, reflecting both economic and
population growth. The absolute number of registrations fell briefly after 1976
(as one might expect, given the shift in that year from mandatory to voluntary
registration), but quickly began to rise again, reaching a peak in 1991. After
1991, however, the number of registrations began to decline; by 2000,
registrations had declined by almost twenty percent from the 1991 peak.
Landes and Posner argue that the post-1991 decline is likely related to increases
in the registration fee imposed during that period: the fee increased from $10 to
$20 in 1991, and increased again to $30 in 2000.96 These relatively trivial
increases in the cost of registration, and the contemporaneous changes in the
rate of registration, represent a kind of natural experiment suggesting that, at
the beginning of the copyright term, many authors place a low net present
value—as low as $20 or $30 plus the similarly trivial cost of complying with
the deposit, notice, and renewal requirements—on their works.97 More recent
94. The campaign was apparently successful, based on the later publication of another
pamphlet, The William Buckley Case: Convicted of Murder and Sentenced to Be Hanged,
Released from Prison by Governor Jas. M. Gillett on October 16, 1909 (1910). The Buckley
case was not one of a simple murder but was connected with larger labor issues, as Buckley
was accused of killing a strikebreaker.
95. Specifically, 4162 did not have a date, which is a conservative proxy for lack of
notice (the presence of a date is not tantamount to notice). Based on a sample of fifty posters,
we found no examples of a poster properly noticed without a date, though technically, post-
1909, this would have been possible for some posters.
96. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 235. Landes and Posner note that another
factor potentially contributing to the decline in registrations may be that “since 1989
registration has no longer been a condition for bringing an infringement suit for foreign
works protected [under] the Berne Convention.” Id. at 235 n.40. However, because foreign
works constitute a small percentage of works registered in the United States, the total
exemption of foreign works from voluntary registration is a relatively unimportant
determinant of registration rates.
97. Note that the consequences of failing to register a copyright are more limited post-
data confirms that the number of registrations has remained flat at a level below
its 1991 peak. In 2003 the Copyright Office registered 534,122 works;98 in
2002, 521,041 works;99 in 2001, 601,659 works.100 These figures confirm that
the basic dynamic of the 1992-2000 period has persisted: unlike prior to 1991,
when registrations had been rising at a significant rate, registration growth has
ceased following the increase in fees.
The registration requirement thus encouraged authors to assess the value of
their works prior to first publication. If the author expected the work to have a
commercial value in excess of the time-adjusted cost of complying with
registration and other formalities, he would take the steps necessary to obtain
copyright protection. But if the costs of protection exceeded the expected
revenues from copyrighting, the author would not register the work.101
In sum, this initial filter separating commercially valuable works from
commercially valueless works helped focus the pre-1976 copyright regime in a
way that maximized the incentive value of copyright while reducing the social
costs. It makes sense to exclude from copyright the many works for which (in
the author’s judgment) protection is unlikely to provide more than trivial
returns, for in those cases the primary effect of copyright is to burden
subsequent use without countervailing private or public benefits.
1976. Failure to register in the post-1976 unconditional regime does not move a work into
the public domain, which raises the possibility that the decline in registrations after 1991 is
the result of many rightsholders delaying registration until an infringement occurs. It is only
after registering a work that a U.S. rightsholder may initiate an infringement suit. 17 U.S.C.
§ 411 (2000). However, failure to register at the work’s inception still imposes a penalty: a
rightsholder may recover neither statutory damages nor attorney’s fees for the period of
nonregistration. Id. § 412. Given the difficulty of proving actual damages in an infringement
suit, and the possibility that infringement may go undetected for long periods, the
rightsholder who waits until detecting infringement to register his work risks forfeiting a
substantial share of the infringement damages he might have recovered had he registered at
the beginning of the term. Accordingly, any rightsholder who, at the inception of a copyright
term, forecasts a substantial net present value for his work is likely to register. Accordingly,
the correlation between the post-1991 decline in registrations and the concomitant fee
increases holds, even though registration no longer is equivalent to complete forfeiture of
rights.
98. U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, supra note 66, at 62.
99. U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, 105TH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS
FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2002, at 8 (2002).
100. U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, 104TH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS
FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2001, at 2 (2001).
101. If an author (or, perhaps more relevantly, a publisher) foresees little commercial
value for a particular work, that work may be neither registered nor published, in which case
the federal copyright term would not commence under pre-1976 law. See 1909 Act, supra
note 32, §§ 10-11. Rather, the work would have been subject to perpetual common law
copyright. However, under post-1976 rules, fixation in a tangible medium, not publication, is
the trigger for copyright. See supra text accompanying note 10.
In our current unconditional copyright system, we have discarded this

initial filter, and, as a result, copyright burdens the creative process in ways that
it did not previously. For works that lack significant commercial value but
nonetheless have some cultural significance—as, for example, an exemplar of
some historical trend in politics, literature, or the arts—unconditional copyright
raises the cost of copying the work for noncommercial or scholarly uses by at
least the value of the time spent identifying the rightsholder and seeking
permission.
An example of this problem would be an academic study of the advent and
explosive growth of Internet “weblogs.”102 Imagine that the author wished to
use a large number of weblog postings as source material for his analysis.
Unless the subject weblogs signaled freedom of use through a publicly noticed
free license,103 the academic who wanted to include a large number of weblog
posts in his study would be obliged either to clear rights to each post (or at least
each post from which he wanted to draw more than limited quotations), or to
trust his fate to the vagaries of the fair use doctrine.104 The burden of clearing
rights for a large number of sources would make the academic project much
more expensive.
Similarly, unconditional copyright also burdens potentially valuable
transformative uses by raising the cost of using commercially valueless source
material as building blocks for derivative works that take the original, improve
on it, and find a market for the final product. Examples abound of derivative
works that enjoy commercial success far surpassing their source material. One
102. A weblog (sometimes shortened to “blog”) is a website, usually of noncommercial

origin, that uses a dated log format updated on a daily or very frequent basis to provide
information about a particular subject or range of subjects. Weblog content may be written
by the blog’s owner, gleaned from other Internet or non-Internet sources, or contributed by
users. A weblog may consist of the “postings” of the blog’s owner, or may accept postings
from users. For examples of popular weblogs, see Slashdot, at http://slashdot.org (last visited
Sept. 9, 2004), a user-driven blog focused on issues of interest to the computer programming
community, or TalkingPointsMemo, at http://talkingpointsmemo.com (last visited Sept. 9,
2004), a political weblog authored by Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington, D.C.,
journalist.
103. Some weblogs do precisely that. See, e.g., Bag and Baggage, at
http://bgbg.blogspot.com/ (last visited Oct. 11, 2004) (weblog of appellate and intellectual
property lawyer Denise Howell). See infra text accompanying notes 115-123 for discussion
of Creative Commons, an organization that has developed special licenses to allow the
public free use of copyright-protected works.
104. For a large and diverse set of examples of uses of copyrighted material that might
conceivably be deemed “fair” but have nonetheless drawn allegations of infringement and
demands to cease and desist, see Electronic Frontier Found. et al., Chilling Effects
Clearinghouse, at http://www.chillingeffects.org (last visited Sept. 9, 2004). The need for
both would-be users and rightsholders to engage in expensive legal analysis of the four
indeterminate factors that together comprise the statutory test for fair use, 17 U.S.C. § 107
(2000), is itself a cost imposed with significantly greater frequency in an unconditional
copyright regime.
relatively recent instance is the song “Superman,” a hit in 1986 for the Athens,
Georgia, band R.E.M. “Superman” had originally been released in 1969 by The
Clique, an obscure Houston, Texas, group. The Clique’s version of the song
was not a hit (in fact, it was the “B side” to The Clique’s only hit single, “Sugar
On Sunday”), and the band released only one album which, by the time R.E.M.
recorded its cover, had long been “out of print.” Due, however, to the
popularity of the R.E.M. cover version of “Superman,” a compilation recording
of The Clique’s work was reissued in 1998.105
Reworkings of musical performances are addressed by the provision of the
Copyright Act imposing compulsory licenses for “mechanical rights”—i.e., an
automatic license that gives artists the ability to record and distribute their own
versions of musical compositions for a fee set by statute.106 But for derivative
works other than new performances of musical compositions, an author
wishing to use even the most obscure and commercially valueless material
must identify a rightsholder and ask permission. The necessity of identifying
rightsholders and negotiating rights raises the cost of creating derivative works.
Consequently, output of potentially valuable derivative works will fall under an
unconditional copyright regiume, in comparison to a conditional regime in
which commercially valueless source materials are filtered out of the copyright
system at their inception.
Although the utility of the registration and notice formalities seems
obvious, they have more often been viewed, on balance, as a hindrance. A 1904
report by the Register of Copyrights makes that point, lamenting that “a system
has gradually grown up under which valuable literary rights have come to
depend upon exact compliance with the statutory formalities which have no
relation to the equitable rights involved, and the question may very well be
raised whether this condition should be continued.”107 Criticism of formalities
and tales of hardship arising from accidental noncompliance abound in the
historical copyright literature.108
105. See ARTISTDirect, Inc., The Clique: Biography, at http://store.artistdirect.com/

music/artist/bio/0,,415704,00.html?artist=The+Clique (last visited Oct. 11, 2004).
106. 17 U.S.C. § 115 (2000). The compulsory license provision requires that notice be
given to the licensor within thirty days of making the recording and before any distribution
occurs. But, in a proviso that is especially relevant here, § 115(b)(1) provides that “[i]f the
registration or other public records of the Copyright Office do not identify the copyright
owner and include an address at which notice can be served, it shall be sufficient to file the
notice of intention in the Copyright Office.”
107. THORVALD SOLBERG, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, REPORT ON COPYRIGHT
LEGISLATION 25 (1904).
108. See, e.g., Copyright Law Revision: Hearings Before the Subcomm. on Patents,
Trademarks, and Copyrights, 89th Cong. 68 (1965) (statement of Abraham L. Kaminstein,
Register of Copyrights) (“The [1909 Act] contains a number of highly technical
requirements concerning copyright notice, registration, and deposit, and the recording of
assignments which are not only burdensome and difficult to understand but which, in too
There are two principal responses to the “unintentional noncompliance”

objection to formalities. The first is that failure to comply with formalities is
“endogenous”—i.e., failure to comply with mandatory formalities is evidence
that the value of the work in question is less than the cost of educating oneself
about and complying with a particular formality.109 Because a person in
possession of rights to a valuable work has an incentive to educate himself
about the steps required to perfect and maintain those rights, we need not
concern ourselves with noncompliance—it is not evidence of a failure of the
system of formalities, but a signal that the prospect of obtaining or maintaining
rights in the work is not valuable enough to merit the required investment in
compliance.
Of course, many would prefer that noncompliance with formalities reflect
an informed decision, rather than a mistake. The second response to the
noncompliance problem proceeds from the assumption that we are not willing
to ignore noncompliance as “endogenous.” The rate of noncompliance is
dependent, to some extent, upon the difficulty of educating oneself about and
then complying with a particular formality. Administering registration and
renewal through simple online forms would lower the cost of complying with
these formalities and reduce the incidence of unintentional noncompliance.
Similarly, turning over the task of administering registration and renewal
formalities to a number of private firms would, by sparking competition to
expand the pool of consumers of “formalities-compliance services,” increase
the availability of consumer information about compliance with formalities and
further reduce the incidence of unintentional noncompliance. Professor
Lawrence Lessig has suggested that private provision of formalities-compliance
services could be modeled on the current system for registering Internet domain
names—i.e., a central registry maintained by government or a public-private
partnership (like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN),110 which maintains the main top-level Internet domains (.com, .org,
.net)) into which many competing registrars feed the data that is submitted by
consumers. (In the Internet context, firms like Stargate.com111 and Network
Solutions112 compete to offer domain name registration services.) As Lessig
notes, competition between competing registrars drives down the cost of
registering an Internet domain name and increases the ease with which
many cases, result in a complete loss of copyright protection.”).

109. See LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 238.
110. Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN Information, at
http://www.icann.org/general (last visited Sept. 9, 2004); see also LESSIG, FREE CULTURE,
supra note 4, at 288-89.
111. See generally Stargate.com Inc., Welcome to Stargate.com, at
http://www.stargateinc.com (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
112. See generally Network Solutions, Home, at http://www.networksolutions.com
/en_US (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
registration occurs.113 There is no reason that competition could not do the

same in the context of compliance with copyright formalities.
There is one final observation (not exactly an objection) related to the
filtering function of registration and notice. It might be argued that, even in our
current unconditional system, authors are free to dedicate their works to the
public domain, and therefore rather than reinstall formalities, we should
encourage public domain deeding as a method of filtering commercially
valueless works out of copyright. But dedication to the public domain is not a
substitute for the filtering function that formalities provide in a conditional
copyright system. First, there is no provision in our current unconditional
regime establishing rules for how dedication may be accomplished, and it has
never been conclusively determined under current law that one may irreversibly
dedicate a work to the public domain (though dedication has been judicially
enforced under pre-1976 law114).
Assuming dedication can be done, it must be accomplished by a license “to
the world,” via, for example, a statement imprinted on all copies of a published
work that “the author grants a nonexclusive right to any person to use this work
in any way.” The process of dedication is thus the mirror image of compliance
with registration and notice formalities. In a conditional system, a rightsholder
must invest in compliance with formalities to obtain protection. In an
unconditional system, a rightsholder must spend time and money on the process
of dedication in order to disclaim protection. The conditional system relies on
self-interest to filter commercially valueless works out of copyright. The
dedication process in an unconditional system relies on altruism, and its effect
is therefore inevitably limited.
To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that, in our current unconditional
system, public domain dedication should not be encouraged. Dedication is not a
complete answer, but it can help, and new ways should be found to make the
process more effective. Creative Commons, a project formed by a group of
activists, academics, and content creators to give rightsholders choices about
how their works may be used in addition to the “all rights reserved” default of
the formal copyright law, has been active on this front.115
Creative Commons provides a variety of “some rights reserved” licenses,
including licenses allowing free use with attribution,116 noncommercial use,117
113. See LESSIG, FREE CULTURE, supra note 4, at 289.

114. See, e.g., Bell v. Combined Registry Co., 397 F.Supp. 1241 (N.D. Ill. 1975)
(holding that a rightsholder had abandoned the copyright by authorizing others to use it
without limitation and writing in his diary that it was a “gift” to the world ), aff’d, 536 F.2d
164 (7th Cir. 1976).
115. Creative Commons, About Us, at http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus (last
visited Sept. 9, 2004).
116. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Deed: Attribution 2.0, at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 (last visited Nov. 29, 2004).
use without the right to make derivative works,118 and use with the requirement
that the user make freely usable any derivative work created using the original
source material (referred to as the “share-alike” license,119 similar in purpose to
the “copyleft” movement’s Open Software License120 and GNU General Public
License121). Creative Commons also provides a “no rights reserved” public
domain dedication license, which provides a perpetual and unconditional
license “for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the
Dedicator’s heirs and successors,”122 as well as a “Founders’ Copyright”
license, under which rightsholders agree to dedicate their work to the public
domain after either a fourteen- or twenty-eight-year period.123 I will return to
Creative Commons later as we consider how to build and implement new-style
formalities.
2. Renewal
Until it was eliminated by the 1976 Act (for pre-1978 works) and the
Copyright Renewal Act (for all other works), the renewal formality served as
another filter, one that operated later in the lifecycle of the copyrighted work as
an ex post test of commercial viability.
The effect of the renewal requirement was, again, to measure authors’
desire for protection. The mechanism was the same as that for the initial filter
of registration, only it measured not whether a work had commercial value at
its inception, but whether its value was enduring. Works that retained
commercial value at the end of the initial copyright term (first fourteen and
later twenty-eight years) were renewed. Authors would not bother, however, to
renew works that ceased to profit them at the end of the initial term and for
which they held no realistic expectation of future profit. Historically,
approximately 15% of works were renewed, meaning that 85% of works moved
into the public domain—by consent of rightsholders—after a relatively short
term of protection.
117. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Deed: NonCommercial 1.0, at

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc/1.0 (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
118. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Deed: NoDerivs 1.0, at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nd/1.0 (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
119. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Deed: ShareAlike 1.0, at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0 (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
120. Open Source Initiative, Open Software License v. 2.0, at
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.0.php (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
121. Free Software Found., GNU General Public License, at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
122. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
123. Creative Commons, The Founders’ Copyright, at http://creativecommons.org/
projects/founderscopyright (last visited Sept. 9, 2004).
Copyright Office data on renewal rates suggests that many authors place a
low value on continued copyright protection at the end of an initial copyright
term. In a 1961 report based on data subsequent to the 1909 Act, the head of the
Copyright Office’s Examining Division stated that, for the minority of
published works that were registered and for which notice of copyright was
given, less than 15% of all copyrights were being renewed.124
Landes and Posner, looking at Copyright Office data from 1910 to 2000,
arrived at the same average rate of renewal—around 15%.125 Figures 2 and 3,
above, graph the annual number of renewals and the rate of copyright renewal,
respectively, during that period. The data shows that the gross number of
renewals grew by a factor of more than ten between 1910 and 1991. But the
percentage of works renewed remained low throughout the period. Working
from the same data used by the Copyright Office, Landes and Posner estimate
the rate of renewal at less than 11% for the period between 1883 and 1964,
even though the renewal fee was trivial throughout this period.126 The rate of
renewal rose somewhat between 1980 and 1990, when it reached its single-year
high of 22%. Beginning in 1992, however, the rate began to decline sharply. As
noted above,127 in 1992, renewal for works copyrighted between 1964 and
1977 became automatic under the Copyright Renewal Act, and the decline in
renewal was in large part driven by the elimination of renewal as a formality.
But because the 1992 amendments did not eliminate all incentive to renew a
work, Landes and Posner argue that the decline in renewal is also likely to be
related to increases in the renewal fee, which doubled to $12 in 1991, rose to
$20 in 1993, and rose again to $45 in 2000.
If the general rate of renewal is low, renewal rates of certain significant
classes of works were even lower: the renewal rate for books has averaged less
than 8%, and for graphic arts approximately 3%.128 The average renewal rate
over this period for music is higher (32%),129 which one would expect given
the regularity with which even very old songs are reworked with new
performers and arrangements. But the renewal rate even for music peaked in
1956 and fell steadily after that. By 1969, the end of the data period for
renewals disaggregated by type of work, the renewal rate for music had fallen
almost to the historical norm for all works of around 15%.130
124. Barbara A. Ringer, Renewal of Copyright, in 1 STUDIES ON COPYRIGHT 503, app.

at 616-20 (Arthur Fisher memorial ed. 1963).
125. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 236.
126. “The renewal fee was $1 from 1909 to 1947, $2 from 1948 to 1965, $4 from 1966
to 1977, $6 from 1978 to 1990, $12 from 1991 to 1992, $20 from 1993 to 1999, and $45
from 2000 to the present.” Id. at 212 n.8.
128. See LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 241-44.
129. Id. at 243.
130. Id. at 242.
In sum, the renewal data reinforces what the registration data suggests—
that the difference between an unconditional and a conditional copyright
system, in terms of the scope of the works each system reaches, is profound. In
a conditional system, a substantial fraction of copyrightable works is not
valuable enough at inception to merit the investment necessary to secure
protection. And only a small portion of works retains enough value at the end
of an initial term to merit renewal. Using Copyright Office registration and
renewal data, Landes and Posner estimate an average annual depreciation rate
for copyrighted works ranging between 5.4% and 12.2%,131 which results in an
average expected commercial life for copyrighted works ranging from 8.2 to
18.5 years.132 Working from copyrights registered in a single year, 1934, the
authors estimate that 50% of the registered works had fully depreciated in just
10 years, 90% in 43 years, and 99% in 65 years.133 These findings are
supported by the results of a 1998 study by the Congressional Research Service
(CRS), which examined a sample of copyrights renewed after an initial term of
twenty-eight years. The CRS study concluded that only 11% of renewed
copyrights in books, 12% in musical works, and 26% in motion pictures had
some continuing commercial value.134
3. Effect of the renewal formality on the real term of copyright
The renewal formality made the “real” term of copyright (in contrast to the
nominal term set out in the copyright statutes) very short by our current
standards. For the subset of works that was not eliminated by the initial
(registration and notice) filter and was therefore subject to copyright, the
longest effective copyright term prior to the 1976 Act, at an average renewal
rate of 15%, was 32.2 years.135 Using the highest historical renewal figure for
all works, 22% (in 1990), the average term of copyright would be 34.2 years.136
Under our current unconditional copyright system, there is no longer any
filtering mechanism tailoring the terms of individual works, and, consequently,
the real and nominal copyright terms have converged. The 1976 Act switched
from a fixed term of years to an indeterminate term for works by individual
authors: at first, life of the author plus fifty years, later extended by the CTEA
131. Id. at 238-39.

132. Id. at 240.
133. Id.
134. See EDWARD B. RAPPAPORT, COPYRIGHT TERM EXTENSION: ESTIMATING THE
ECONOMIC VALUES (Cong. Research Serv. Report 98-144E, 1998).
135. Under pre-1976 law, the longest duration for either the initial or renewal term was
twenty-eight years. Accordingly, using a renewal rate of 15%, the average term of copyright
equals (0.15 * 56) + (0.85 * 28).
136. Using the highest renewal figure of 22%, the calculation is (0.22 * 56) + (0.78 *
28).
to life plus seventy years. For corporate works—known in the argot as “works
for hire”—and anonymous works, the 1976 Act fixed a term of seventy-five
years from the date of publication or one hundred years from creation,
whichever expired first. The CTEA extended those terms to ninety-five and one
hundred twenty years, respectively.
The copyright term is now sufficiently long that the net present value to the
rightsholder of a copyright is practically indistinguishable from what it would
be under a perpetual term. In an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme
Court in support of the petitioners in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a group of economists
that included Nobel Prize winners George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, James
Buchanan, Ronald Coase, and Milton Friedman argued that the current, post-
CTEA copyright term of life plus seventy years has a net present value that is
99.88% of the value of a perpetual term.137
That the copyright term is now effectively perpetual is an odd development
in a country whose constitution specifies that copyrights may be granted only
for “limited times.”138 As will be discussed in greater detail later in this Article,
137. See Economists’ Brief, supra note 1, at 8.

138. I am indebted to Tim Phillips for pointing out to me just how odd an effectively
perpetual term is given the Founders’ very different conception of an appropriate term.
Correspondence between Madison, who crafted the Intellectual Property Clause, and
Jefferson suggests that the Founders thought of the proper length of a limited copyright term
in quite specific actuarial terms. Having resigned himself to the inclusion of a clause
authorizing Congress to create copyrights and patents—a power he initially opposed as liable
to lead to the creation of dangerous “monopolies”—Jefferson proposed in a letter (posted
from France) of August 28, 1789 that copyrights and patents be limited in duration to a fixed
term of years. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (Aug. 28, 1789), in 7 THE
WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 444, 451 (Andrew A. Lipscomb & Albert Ellery Bergh
eds., 1904). Several days afterward, in two letters dated September 6, 1789, Jefferson
proposed a term of nineteen years, based on an actuarial calculation. In his first letter on that
date, Jefferson framed the issue as follows:
The question, whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have
been started on this [the European side] or our [American] side of the water. . . . [T]hat no
such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground,
which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the
dead have neither powers nor rights over it .
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (Sept. 6, 1789), in 7 THE WRITINGS OF
THOMAS JEFFERSON, supra, at 454, 454 (emphasis in original). In an addendum to that letter,
Jefferson reduced his principle to a concrete number:
Buffon gives us a table of twenty-three thousand nine hundred and ninety-four deaths, stating
the ages at which they happened. To draw from these the result I have occasioned for, I
suppose a society in which twenty-three thousand nine hundred and ninety-four persons are
born every year, and live to the age stated in Buffon’s table. Then, the following inferences
may be drawn. Such a society will consist constantly of six hundred and seventeen thousand
seven hundred and three persons, of all ages. Of those living at any one instant of time, one
half will be dead in twenty-four years and eight months. In such a society, ten thousand six
hundred and seventy-five will arrive every year at the age of twenty-one years complete. It
will constantly have three hundred and forty-eight thousand four hundred and seventeen
persons of all ages above twenty one years, and the half of those twenty-one years and
upwards living at any one instant of time, will be dead in eighteen years and eight months, or
copyright’s primary justification in the United States, at least as it has been

articulated historically, is as a means of ensuring that creators realize a large
enough share of whatever revenue their works may produce to ensure that they
are induced to invest in production of creative works. Copyright in the United
States has tended to focus on this utilitarian justification, in contrast to a natural
rights or “labor desert” paradigm that premises copyright on protection of the
author’s right to the fruits of his intellectual labor, or to a moral rights paradigm
in which copyright serves mainly to protect an author’s control over his identity
(i.e., personality) as reflected in his creative works.139 As Professor Paul
Goldstein and others have observed, although at the level of theory one might
expect our utilitarian system to operate quite differently from systems in
continental Europe that are purportedly based on a mixture of natural and moral
rights justifications, in reality copyright systems in the developed world have
converged, and now provide a set of protections that approach what one would
expect under a natural rights paradigm.140
Of course, the natural rights justification for copyright does not necessarily
demand a perpetual term; such a system might merely impose one that allowed
the author to capture substantially all of the fruits of his labor—i.e., one in
which the net present value of the term was practically indistinguishable from a
perpetual term. That is, as the economists’ brief in Eldred shows, exactly the
kind of term we now have under the U.S. system. But even as our notions
regarding the optimal copyright term have shifted closer to the natural rights
paradigm, the deeper rationale for the filtering function of copyright formalities
is still relevant: requiring compliance with formalities helps to reduce the social
costs imposed by granting exclusive rights in expression.
4. The costs of copyright
The social cost of monopoly. Any copyright system that grants exclusive
rights, whether based in a utilitarian or natural/moral rights conception,
imposes a number of different social costs. First, there is an obvious economic
cost, which is a specific instance of the general problem of monopoly: If a
say nineteen years.

Then, the contracts, constitutions and laws of every such society become void in nineteen
years from their date.
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Gem (Sept. 6, 1789), in 7 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS
JEFFERSON, supra, at 462, 462-63. The same computation using life tables from 1992 yields a
Jeffersonian copyright term of between thirty and thirty-five years. See 2 U.S. DEP’T OF
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, VITAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES 1992: MORTALITY,
pt. A, § 6, tbl.6-1 (1996).
139. See generally Justin Hughes, The Philosophy of Intellectual Property, 77 GEO.
L.J. 287 (1988); Carla Hesse, The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C.-A.D. 2000: An Idea
in the Balance, DAEDALUS, Spring 2002, at 26.
140. See, e.g., 1 PAUL GOLDSTEIN, COPYRIGHT § 1.13.2.3 (2d ed. 2004).
particular creative work has a market value, exclusive rights will enable the
creator to charge a supracompetitive price. Consequently, access to the work
will be denied to those who value it in excess of the competitive price, but less
than the supracompetitive price that the monopolist is able to command.141
Copyright, then, creates deadweight losses in markets for expression.
The monopoly costs of copyright, while very real for works that possess
significant commercial value, are relatively unimportant to the commercially
valueless or exhausted works that conditional copyright filtered out but
unconditional copyright locks up. While an unconditional system keeps
economically spent works under copyright, the persistence of exclusive rights
can do little to raise the price of a piece of expression that is commercially
valueless—the rightsholder, in such an instance, may have a notional
“monopoly” but lack any power to demand a supracompetitive price.
Copyright’s burdens on speech. Much more important for our purposes are
the two types of “cultural” costs imposed by copyright. Copyright imposes a
First Amendment cost inhering in the restrictions on free speech imposed when
rightsholders are allowed to prevent copying of their works. The recent
copyright dispute involving Diebold Election Systems provides an example of a
potentially significant First Amendment cost imposed by copyright.
Diebold manufactures electronic voting machines. Sometime in early 2003
a hacker broke into the company’s computer systems and stole a large number
of internal e-mails and memoranda. Some of the stolen documents included
discussions of software bugs in Diebold voting machines and warnings that the
machines may produce unverifiable results and are poorly protected against
hackers.142 In August 2003, an unknown person mailed approximately 13,000
pages of the stolen data to a number of activists concerned with electronic
voting, many of whom published the Diebold e-mails and memos, or linked to
those documents, on their websites.
In response, Diebold sent dozens of cease-and-desist notices, pursuant to
the “notice and take-down” provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA),143 to website publishers and Internet service providers (ISPs),
demanding that they remove the documents from websites and cease linking to
141. For a more fully developed account of the benefits and costs of copyright, see
Linda R. Cohen & Roger G. Noll, Intellectual Property, Antitrust and the New Economy, 62
U. PITT. L. REV. 453 (2001).
142. For factual background, see First Amended Complaint, Online Policy Group v.
Diebold Inc., No. C 03-04913 JF, 2004 WL 2203382 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 30, 2004), available at
http://www.eff.org/legal/ISP_liability/OPG_v_Diebold/First_Amended_Complaint.pdf (last
visited Sept. 9, 2004).
143. Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998). The DMCA provides a “safe harbor”
provision as an incentive for ISPs to take down user-posted content when they receive cease-
and-desist letters such as the ones sent by Diebold. 17 U.S.C. § 512(c) (2000). By removing
the content, or forcing the user to do so, for a minimum of ten days, an ISP can immunize
itself from any copyright claim. 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(2)(C).
the documents. Two recipients of the Diebold letters, a group of Swarthmore

College students and an ISP providing pro bono Internet hosting to nonprofit
organizations, filed suit seeking a declaratory judgment that their publication of
the Diebold documents is lawful.
The district court recently issued a summary judgment ruling that suggests
Diebold’s copyright misadventures may backfire.144 The case is still pending as
of this writing, but the eventual result is less relevant for our purposes than
what the facts of the case say about the free speech costs of unconditional
copyright. Clearly, copyright incentives have little to do with whether Diebold
creates the type of corporate documents at issue in this case. Diebold’s
employees and contractors create and distribute these documents in the
ordinary course of the company’s business, and they will continue to do so
without regard to their copyright status. In our unconditional copyright system,
where the Diebold documents gain automatic copyright protection at the
moment of their fixation, the only function of copyright is to allow Diebold to
inhibit public discussion of whether its voting machines are reliable. In
contrast, in a reformalized system, most of the Diebold documents likely never
would be subject to copyright in the first place (because Diebold does not
expect to profit from the content itself, it almost certainly would not invest in
compliance with formalities) and consequently Diebold would be unable to use
copyright law as a means of limiting discussion regarding an issue of the
highest public concern.145
The Diebold dispute shows us that by bringing within the scope of
copyright a huge number of works for which its incentive system is irrelevant,
our unconditional copyright regime makes the potential conflict between
copyright and the First Amendment much more severe than it would be under a
conditional regime.146 This is an important point that no court has ever
addressed, but which is quickly becoming salient.
144. Online Policy Group v. Diebold Inc., No. C 03-04913 JF, 2004 WL 2203382
(N.D. Cal. Sept. 30, 2004), available at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/cases/20040930_
Diebold_SJ_Order.pdf (last visited Nov. 11, 2004).
145. Note that under the pre-1976 regime, where federal copyright commenced upon
“publication” and perpetual common law copyright applied to unpublished works, Diebold’s
unpublished corporate memoranda would likely have been subject to common law copyright,
and Diebold would still have had a powerful copyright lever. (I say “likely,” rather than
“certainly,” because the pre-1976 rules determining what constituted “publication”—the
trigger that terminated state common law copyright and moved a work into the federal
system—were the subject of substantial debate and confusion. See William S. Strauss,
Protection of Unpublished Works, in 1 STUDIES ON COPYRIGHT, supra note 124, at 189, 198-
205. In contrast, under a reformalized version of our post-1976 system, where federal
copyright arises upon fixation, documents like the Diebold memoranda would seldom enter
the copyright system.
146. See, e.g., Religious Tech. Ctr. v. Netcom On-Line Communication Servs., Inc.,
923 F. Supp. 1231 (N.D. Cal. 1995) (holding that copyright could be used to prevent
distribution of Church of Scientology materials). See generally Jed Rubenfeld, The Freedom
Copyright “buffering” doctrines and the First Amendment. When

considering the potential friction between copyright and the First Amendment,
courts (including the Supreme Court in Eldred) have often pointed to two
doctrines, the idea/expression dichotomy and the fair use defense, that act as
buffers preventing copyright from interfering unduly with free speech. Because
copyright protects only expression, courts have reasoned, ideas remain free for
others to discuss and build upon. And because it is sometimes important, in
talking about an idea, to use a particular bit of expression that may be
protected, the fair use doctrine operates to allow the use of portions of a
protected work for certain purposes—chiefly academic and journalistic
criticism, and parody—that are considered necessary to maintaining the
vibrancy of political and cultural debate.
Although the Eldred Court was not entirely clear on the point, its opinion
may be taken to suggest that these doctrines are “traditional contours” of
copyright that, left untouched, suffice to protect copyright’s cohabitation with
the First Amendment.147 But the Court’s reliance on these doctrines is almost
certain to come under increasing strain. The idea/expression dichotomy makes
perfect sense for one medium, written text, where the separation of idea from
expression is relatively straightforward. But the dichotomy never applied
particularly well to nontextual media, such as music or graphic arts, where the
“idea” is difficult, if not impossible, to separate from the expression. As
technology shifts creativity toward new media that focus on “sampling,”
“remixing,” or “mashing up” bits of film, text, music, and graphic arts, we can
expect to see fewer instances where the idea/expression dichotomy can do
much to insulate the use of “ideas” from infringement liability.
A similar dynamic is now undermining the fair use doctrine. In the old
media world of paper books, celluloid films, magnetic videotapes, and vinyl
recordings (or even, until recently, unencrypted CDs), one gained the ability to
make a fair use simply by acquiring a copy of the work. Because there were
exceedingly few analogues, in the analog world, to today’s digital encryption
and rights-management technologies, one was granted access by virtue of
possession. But in the digital environment, possession does not necessarily
imply the ability to make fair uses. Digital works are often encrypted, and the
DMCA imposes civil and criminal penalties for the use—or even the
distribution—of technologies designed to circumvent copy controls protecting
copyrighted works.148 Courts in cases like Universal City Studios, Inc. v.
Corley have held that the right of fair use does not imply a right of access to
of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality, 112 YALE L.J. 1 (2002) (limning copyright’s

conflicts with the First Amendment and suggesting limitations to constitutionalize
copyright).
147. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 220 (2003).
148. 17 U.S.C. § 1201 (2000).
copyrighted works that may be required to make a fair use.149 That holding
threatens to make fair use a mirage as technology shifts creativity from analog
to digital media.
Assessing whether fair use includes some notion of fair access is one of the
areas where copyright analogies from the analog world break down. Questions
of access in the analog world only come up when the access sought is to
someone else’s property. How could it be otherwise, since possession of analog
materials necessarily entails access to make a copy? In contrast, the issue we
confront in the digital world is access to one’s own property for the purpose of
making fair uses. Put that way, a judicially established right of access would
not seem to require much of a logical leap. But to say that there is not currently
a judicially established right of access to make fair uses of copyrighted
materials is not especially meaningful. In the analog world we lived in until
only yesterday (at least in the time frame of the law), the question simply never
came up.
For the moment, however, it is clear that if fair use in the digital
environment depends on fair access, the opportunities to make fair uses in a
world of strong (and legally enforced) encryption are going to be substantially
restricted. As with the idea/expression dichotomy, the shift from the analog to
the digital environment has altered (or, more precisely, has constricted) the
“traditional contours” of the fair use doctrine. In the case of fair use, however,
the effect is worse, because it is not simply the product of shifting technologies,
but of government action—i.e., the DMCA, which prohibits circumvention
without providing any exception for fair use access.
So if the idea/expression dichotomy and fair use have been enfeebled, are
there other “traditional contours” of copyright that remain vigorous enough to
mediate between copyright and the First Amendment? There is—or at least
was—a third “buffer” that played a very significant role: copyright formalities.
Under conditional copyright, formalities served to limit copyright protection to
works that had independent value as expression. Works that lacked expression
value ordinarily would not be copyrighted. The purpose of copyright is to
incent expression ex ante, not to serve as a locking mechanism ex post.
Copyright formalities created an incentive structure that aligned the material
protected under copyright with the overarching justification for the regime.
With the disappearance of formalities, perversions of copyright like we observe
in the Diebold dispute become not only possible, but inevitable.
Copyright’s burden on creativity. In addition to burdening free speech,
copyright also imposes costs on future creativity by shrinking the stock of
preexisting materials available to future creators for use as building blocks in
new works, which reduces consequentially the production of new works.150
149. See Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 458-59 (2d Cir. 2001).
150. See LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 58-60 (providing examples of
Unlike the monopoly problem, copyright’s toll on future creativity arises

regardless of whether a particular work has a market value.
Individual acts of intellectual creativity may begin with a blank piece of
paper, but the creative process itself is cumulative—every creative work builds
on materials that already exist. Restraints on the ability to copy an entire work
are likely to have only marginal effects on the creation of future works:
although many creative works refer to previous works, such reference rarely
involves literal copying of the entire predecessor work. But copyright reaches
further than wholesale, literal copying. Copyright allows a rightsholder to
restrain works that contain elements substantially similar to any more than a
trivial portion of the rightsholder’s work.151 In addition, the law gives the
rightsholder control over derivative works—i.e., works that involve the
transformative reuse of original (and therefore protected) elements of the
rightsholder’s work.152
The costs of copyright that we have just reviewed are substantially higher
in an unconditional copyright system. Formalities, at least as they operated in
the conditional copyright system that existed before the 1976 Act, minimized
the costs of exclusive rights while retaining all, or virtually all, of the benefits.
They did so by focusing the protections of copyright on those works that were
judged by their authors, first at their inception and then again after an initial
period of protection, to be the kind of commercially valuable creative material
that could, if protected by copyright, potentially provide an economic return.
For these works, the incentive effect of copyright was potentially large enough
to justify the cost of protection. But for works that are not expected to provide a
return for their authors, protection involves only potential costs. Protection for
works that authors judge commercially valueless—i.e., the majority of works—
is a net loss for social welfare.
C. Formalities and “Utilitarian” Copyright
In addition to their role in focusing copyright (i.e., filtering) and creating

ownership information, there is a deeper justification for formalities that ties
together much of what has just been said: formalities are an important
component of our original constitutional commitment to a utilitarian model of
copyright. As we have moved closer to a natural rights paradigm in our
copyright practice, the foundations of American copyright at both the
constitutional and statutory levels have been obscured. But the original
commitments are still there, awaiting the right plaintiff to revive them.
transformative use of preexisting materials in the works of Shakespeare, Yeats, and Eliot,
among others).
151. See 2 GOLDSTEIN, supra note 140, § 7.2.1.2.
152. Id. § 7.4.1.1.
1. The Intellectual Property Clause
Why did the “traditional contours” of pre-1976 U.S. copyright law require
compliance with so many bothersome formalities? In order to understand the
role of formalities in our pre-1976 conditional copyright system, it is helpful
first to look at the source of Congress’s authority to enact copyright laws: the
Constitution’s Intellectual Property Clause. The clause does not itself require
that Congress install any particular formality in copyright laws. Yet it reflects
an original understanding of the purpose of copyright that led, in the early
copyright statutes and for almost two centuries thereafter, to a system that
relied heavily on formalities.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution confers upon
Congress authority “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries.” As the Supreme Court has recognized,
the Intellectual Property Clause is “both a grant of power and a limitation.”153
But aside from formulating that aphorism, the Supreme Court has done little to
limn either the power or the limitation, or to define the judicial role in ensuring
that Congress’s copyright lawmaking remains within the boundaries set out by
the clause.
The most significant continuing dispute in the interpretation of the
Intellectual Property Clause involves the most basic question of interpretation:
which part of the clause sets out the enumerated power? Edward Walterscheid
has argued that the grant of power resides in the “promote . . . Progress”
language, and that that power, moreover, is a general one that authorizes
Congress to undertake a variety of schemes, such as the funding of medical
research or grants to arts organizations, with the common purposes of
encouraging discovery and spreading culture.154 Walterscheid contends that the
second part of the clause (the “exclusive Right[s]” language) was added only
for the purpose of making clear that, subject to certain limitations, Congress
was authorized to grant patents and copyrights as part of its general power to
advance learning.155
More often, however, it has been argued that the power resides in the
“exclusive Right[s]” part of the clause. According to this interpretation, the
power granted is specific—i.e., Congress is authorized to grant limited-time
exclusive rights for the purpose of advancing learning. The federal
153. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 5 (1966).

154. Edward C. Walterscheid, To Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts:
The Anatomy of a Congressional Power, 43 IDEA 1 (2002).
155. Id. at 7.
government’s general power to “promote . . . Progress” through other means, if

it exists at all in the Constitution, must reside elsewhere.156
Questions also remain regarding how the clause limits Congress’s exercise
of its power. The clause limits the copyright grant to the “writings” of
“authors”—by virtue of these limitations, there can be no grant of exclusive
rights in ideas (as opposed to expression), and no grants to publishers. There is
also, as mentioned previously, the “limited times” requirement.
The clause also imposes a more general limitation. In Eldred v. Ashcroft,
the Supreme Court announced that the “promote . . . Progress” phrase functions
as a limitation on Congress’s power to enact copyright laws: “The
‘constitutional command’ . . . is that Congress, to the extent it enacts copyright
laws at all, create a ‘system’ that ‘promote[s] the Progress of Science.’”157
The Court’s statement in Eldred provides no guidance regarding how
judges are to determine whether one of Congress’s copyright enactments fails
to promote progress. Nonetheless, even the bare statement in Eldred undercuts
previous views that the “promote . . . Progress” language is merely a statement
of purpose that functions neither as part of the congressional power, nor as a
limitation of it.158 More importantly, the Court’s statement in Eldred aligns its
reading of the clause in the copyright context with its well-established approach
in patent cases. In the patent context, the Court has long held that the “promote
. . . Progress” language imposes a judicially enforceable constraint on
Congress’s power.159
If the Supreme Court has left basic questions of textual interpretation
unsettled, it has been relatively clear and consistent on an even more basic
interpretive issue raised by the Intellectual Property Clause: the theoretical
156. See, e.g., DAVID P. CURRIE, THE CONSTITUTION IN CONGRESS: THE FEDERALIST
PERIOD, 1789-1801, at 93 (1997) (arguing that the Intellectual Property Clause confers “not a
general power to ‘promote the progress of science and the useful arts,’ but only the power to
grant limited exclusive rights in order to accomplish that goal”).
157. 537 U.S. 186, 212 (2003) (quoting Graham, 383 U.S. at 6).
158. Compare Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102, 112 (D.C. Cir. 1981) (concluding
that introductory language does not limit congressional power), and Mitchell Bros. Film
Group v. Cinema Adult Theater, 604 F.2d 852, 860 (5th Cir. 1979) (same), and 1 NIMMER &
NIMMER, supra note 13, § 1.03 (arguing that the promote progress phrase “is in the main
explanatory of the purpose of copyright, without in itself constituting a rigid standard against
which any copyright act must be measured”), with Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken,
422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975) (suggesting, in dicta, that the promote progress language may
inform the meaning of otherwise ambiguous statutory language: “When technological
change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in
light of [its] basic purpose.”).
159. See Graham, 383 U.S. at 5-6 (“Congress in the exercise of the patent power may
not overreach the restraints imposed by the stated constitutional purpose.”); Great Atl. &
Pac. Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equip. Corp., 340 U.S. 147, 154 (1950) (Douglas, J.,
concurring) (“Congress acts under the restraint imposed by the statement of purpose in Art.
I, § 8.”).
foundation of intellectual property rights. It has long been established—at least

at the level of judicial rhetoric—that copyright is not a natural right, but one
created by positive law.160
The Supreme Court established that principle in the 1834 case of Wheaton
v. Peters.161 In that case, Henry Wheaton, the first reporter of decisions of the
Supreme Court, sued Richard Peters, his successor, alleging that a set of
condensed volumes of Supreme Court opinions (Wheaton’s Reports) that
Peters had published infringed Wheaton’s copyrights. In opposition, Peters
pointed out that Wheaton could not assert a valid copyright in the Court’s
opinions, which is what Peters had republished.162 The Court agreed with
Peters,163 and could simply have dismissed Wheaton’s case on this ground. But
it dealt with this potentially dispositive issue in the last paragraph of its
opinion, choosing instead to focus on the much more difficult alternative
defenses Peters had raised: (1) that Wheaton could only claim copyright in his
published works under federal law, as the right did not exist at common law,164
and (2) that Wheaton’s failure to timely deposit his volumes with the Secretary
of State, and to give public notice in a newspaper of that deposit, vitiated any
copyright he might otherwise hold under the copyright acts of 1790 and
1802.165
The Court upheld both of Peters’s defenses, holding that the author’s
copyright in his published works is created by statute and does not exist at
common law.166 Wheaton argued that the use of the phrase “securing . . .
exclusive rights” in the Intellectual Property Clause and “securing [to authors]
the copies of maps, charts and books” in the founding copyright statute
indicated that both the Constitution and the 1790 Act were “securing” to
authors a right that already existed at common law, and that continued to
exist.167 The Court rejected that argument: both the clause and the 1790 Act,
160. For a comprehensive summary of the natural rights, utilitarian, communitarian,

and other theories of intellectual property, see Justin Hughes, The Philosophy of Intellectual
Property, in INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: MORAL, LEGAL, AND INTERNATIONAL DILEMMAS 107
(Adam D. Moore ed., 1997).
161. 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591, 657 (1834); cf. Jane C. Ginsburg, A Tale of Two Copyrights:
Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America, 147 REVUE INTERNATIONALE DU
DROIT D’AUTEUR 125, 141-47 (1991) (tracing mix of utilitarian and authors’ rights
motivations in early development of both U.S. and French copyright laws).
162. 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) at 619.
163. Id. at 668.
164. Id. at 625.
165. Id. at 634-35.
166. Id. at 657 (“The argument that a literary man is as much entitled to the product of
his labour as any other member of society, cannot be controverted. And the answer is, that he
realises [sic] this product by the transfer of his manuscripts, or in the sale of his works, when
first published.”).
167. Id. at 660-61.
the Court stated, refer to inventions (i.e., patents) as well as literary works, and
“it has never been pretended, by any one, either in this country or in England,
that an inventor has a perpetual right, at common law, to sell the thing
invented.”168 Neither the clause nor the 1790 Act provided any reason to
distinguish between the source of the exclusive right for inventions versus
literary works. The Court also found, in a passage notable more for its
forcefulness than its logic, that the language of the 1790 Act established that
Congress was creating a right, not sanctioning an existing one:
That congress, in passing the act of 1790, did not legislate in reference to
existing rights, appears clear, from the provision that the author, &c ‘shall
have the sole right and liberty of printing,’ &c. Now if this exclusive right
existed at common law, and congress were about to adopt legislative
provisions for its protection, would they have used this language? Could they
have deemed it necessary to vest a right already vested. Such a presumption is
refuted by the words above quoted, and their force is not lessened by any other
part of the act.169
Having found that copyright in published works was a right created by
statute, the Court held that noncompliance with the statutory prerequisites—
including those, such as deposit and notice, performed subsequent to
publication—vitiates the copyright:
[T]he inquiry is made, shall the non performance of these subsequent
conditions operate as a forfeiture of the right?
The answer is, that this is not a technical grant of precedent and subsequent
conditions. All the conditions are important; the law requires them to be
performed; and, consequently, their performance is essential to a perfect
title.170
Facing an incomplete factual record, the Court remanded to the circuit court for
a determination whether Wheaton had complied with the deposit and notice
formalities.171
If the Supreme Court in Wheaton made clear that copyright is established
by law, rather than merely enforced by it, then the obvious question is “For
what purpose has the right been established?” Uniquely among the legislative
powers enumerated in Article I, Section 8, the Intellectual Property Clause ties
the power to grant patents and copyrights to a specified purpose—the
promotion of progress in “science” (by which the Framers meant all forms of
knowledge, including literature and the arts) and the “useful arts” (by which the
Framers meant patentable inventions). The justification for copyright (and
patent) set out in the clause is utilitarian: Congress is authorized to create
exclusive rights not as an end in itself, but merely as a means of “promoting
168. Id. at 661.

169. Id.
170. Id. at 664-65.
171. Id. at 667.
progress.” The creation of exclusive rights will induce investment in literary,

artistic, and scientific work, by, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “add[ing] the fuel
of interest to the fire of genius.”172 Whether granting exclusive rights is the
means best suited to that end is one of the large questions that has produced an
interesting debate but is left aside in this Article.
In its occasional encounters with the Intellectual Property Clause, the
Supreme Court has spoken in the utilitarian language of incentives and
access—though, as Professor Stewart Sterk has pointed out, the Court’s
rhetoric has not been entirely consistent.173 In United States v. Paramount
Pictures, the Court wrote that “[t]he copyright law, like the patent statutes,
makes reward to the owner a secondary consideration. . . . It is said that reward
to the author or artist serves to induce release to the public of the products of
his creative genius.”174 In Mazer v. Stein, the Court wrote that “[t]he economic
philosophy behind the clause empowering Congress to grant patents and
copyrights is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal
gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors
and inventors.”175 In Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, the Court wrote that
the exclusive rights granted under the copyright laws “are neither unlimited nor
primarily designed to provide a special private benefit. Rather, the limited grant
is a means by which an important public purpose may be achieved. It is
intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the
provision of a special reward . . . .”176
So at least at a high level of generality—i.e., in the Supreme Court’s obiter
dicta on copyright’s overall purpose—American copyright law has been set on
a utilitarian foundation. This model constructs copyright as a creature of
positive law, by which exclusive rights (limited, in their application, by the
express constraints set out in the Intellectual Property Clause) may be offered,
or withheld, on whatever basis is rationally calculated to benefit the public.
Congress, too, has often spoken in the same language. For example, consider
this précis of utilitarian copyright from a legislative report on the Copyright Act
of 1909:
172. Abraham Lincoln, Second Lectures on Discoveries and Inventions (Feb. 11,
1859), in 3 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 356, 363 (Roy P. Basler ed.,
1953).
173. Stewart E. Sterk, Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law, 94 MICH. L. REV. 1197,
1203 (1996); cf. Mazer v. Stein, 347 U.S. 201, 219 (1954) (“Sacrificial days devoted to such
creative activities deserve rewards commensurate with the services rendered.”).
174. 334 U.S. 131, 158 (1948).
175. 347 U.S. at 219.
176. 464 U.S. 417, 429 (1984); see also Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422
U.S. 151, 156 (1975) (“The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return
for an ‘author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic
creativity for the general public good.”).
The enactment of copyright legislation by Congress under the terms of the

Constitution is not based upon any natural right that the author has in his
writings, for the Supreme Court has held that such rights as he has are purely
statutory rights, but upon the ground that the welfare of the public will be
served and progress of science and useful arts will be promoted by securing to
authors for limited periods the exclusive rights to their writings. The
Constitution does not establish copyrights, but provides that Congress shall
have the power to grant such rights if it thinks best. Nor primarily for the
benefit of the author, but primarily for the benefit of the public, such rights are
given. . . .
In enacting a copyright law Congress must consider . . . two questions:
First, how much will the legislation stimulate the producer and so benefit the
public, and, second, how much will the monopoly granted be detrimental to
the public? The granting of such exclusive rights, under the proper terms and
conditions, confers a benefit upon the public that outweighs the evils of the
temporary monopoly.177
D. Copyright’s Increasingly Uneasy Fit with the Constitution
If our copyright system were driven purely by the utilitarian concerns that
undergird the Intellectual Property Clause, rather than by more concrete
political considerations,178 we might expect our copyright term to be relatively
short and formalities to permeate the law. But while Congress and the courts
have paid lip service to utilitarian copyright, they have, on a practical level,
acquiesced to developments in the law—including the move from conditional
to unconditional copyright, the broadening of the rights granted by copyright to
cover nearly every conceivable use of the protected work (including the
production of derivative works), and the extension of the term to a point that
the return to rightsholders is indistinguishable from that produced by perpetual
copyright—that together have made our theoretically utilitarian system almost
177. H.R. REP. NO. 60-2222, at 7 (1909). Almost a century earlier, Thomas Jefferson
expressed the same idea with characteristic felicity:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is
the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess
as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar
character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he
who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. . . . Inventions then cannot,
in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising
from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this
may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim
or complaint from anybody.
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (Aug. 13, 1813), in 13 THE WRITINGS OF
THOMAS JEFFERSON, supra note 138, at 326, 333-34.
178. See generally LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, ch. 15 (discussing the political
economy of intellectual property law).
indistinguishable from continental European systems that are based on an

author’s natural rights.179
The pressing question at this point, given the Supreme Court’s recent
holding in Eldred v. Ashcroft, is, of course, “So what?” With the Eldred
Court’s willingness to cede to Congress the task of reconciling the copyright
laws to the demands of both the Intellectual Property Clause and the First
Amendment, there seems to be little prospect that the judiciary will arrest
copyright’s drift away from its utilitarian moorings.
And yet, embedded in the majority’s opinion in Eldred is a phrase that
shows that a sudden collision between the copyright laws and the Constitution
is still quite possible. The Court repelled the petitioners’ First Amendment
claim by holding that “when . . . Congress has not altered the traditional
contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is
unnecessary.”180 The Court is making a historical claim about what the
“traditional contours” of copyright have been, and is asserting that because
copyright has remained largely within these original metes and bounds, nothing
has happened to disturb the Founders’ original conception that copyright is
consistent with the First Amendment. The Court did much the same in turning
away the petitioners’ Intellectual Property Clause challenge: “Congress’s
unbroken practice since the founding generation [of extending both new and
subsisting copyrights] thus overwhelms petitioners’ argument that the CTEA’s
extension of existing copyright fails per se to ‘promote the Progress of
Science.’”181 “[A] page of history,” the Court said, “is worth a volume of
logic.”182
History may indeed surpass logic as a useful tool in legal analysis, but
neither method is particularly useful if you get the basic facts wrong.183 The
“traditional contours” of copyright have not been altered as much as they have
been obliterated—by, among other developments, our recent transition from
conditional to unconditional copyright. Before 1976, copyright applied to a
minority of works; it now applies to all. Before 1976, the effective copyright
179. See 1 GOLDSTEIN, supra note 140, § 1.13.2.

181. Id. at 213-14 (quoting Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 175 (1926)).
182. Id. at 200 (quoting New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921)).
183. Unfortunately, the Court’s First Amendment logic is no better than its history. The
Court errs by downplaying the First Amendment concern, stating that the inquiry is less
exacting where “speakers assert the right to make other people’s speeches,” rather than their
own. Id. at 221. But characterizing the claim as “a right to make other people’s speeches”
misses the core free speech issue posed by copyright extension. The Court frames the issue
as focused on pure copying. Much more important is the right to engage in transformative
use—i.e., to employ some elements of another’s speech for the purpose of building one’s
own speech. This kind of appropriation and “remixing” is a common way that speech is
constructed in our culture, but the Court’s framing of the issue pretends that only copying,
and not creativity, is at stake.
term for the large majority of works was twenty-eight years; today copyright
imposes a uniform term lasting, on average, three times as long. Considering
the distance our law has traveled in the evolution from conditional to
unconditional copyright, it is difficult at this point to understand which of
copyright’s “traditional contours” the Court believes remain undisturbed.
It is not enough to look, as the Court did in Eldred, at the copyright term in
isolation. When one looks more closely at the effects of a series of seemingly
minor changes to the copyright law—changes that are unrelated (or at least not
facially related) to the copyright term—it is clear that the “traditional contours”
of our copyright system went through a disjunction during the move from
conditional to unconditional copyright. Of course, it may be difficult just now,
considering the result in Eldred, to see exactly how the increasing detachment
of U.S. copyright law from its constitutional underpinnings could lead to
judicial intervention and invalidation of elements of the law. The following are
two possible arguments that have been advanced in Kahle v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit
filed recently in a federal court in California.184
1. Term extension without renewal filter
Copyright’s potential collision with the Constitution could take the form of
an Intellectual Property Clause challenge to copyright extension that is
somewhat narrower—but no less potentially disruptive to the status quo—than
that posed in Eldred. The argument urges a reevaluation of the historical
record, based on an observation about the effect of the renewal formality on
copyright extensions that was never raised in Eldred.
While Congress had extended the term of subsisting copyrights on several
occasions prior to the CTEA, in every case before the CTEA, the subsisting
copyrights whose terms were extended were required to pass at some point
through the filter of renewal. The 1831 Act extended the initial term of
subsisting copyrights from fourteen to twenty-eight years, but within a regime
that required copyright owners to renew their copyright to secure the benefits of
the maximum term of forty-two years.185 The 1909 Act likewise extended the
renewal term of subsisting copyrights, but the Act expressly limited its effect to
works that had been renewed.186 Even the 1976 Act, which began the march
toward unconditional copyright and again extended the term of subsisting
copyrights, limited its extension to works that had been renewed.187
184. Kahle Complaint, supra note 5. The author is co-counsel for plaintiffs in this
lawsuit.
185. See supra notes 33, 35 and accompanying text.
186. See supra text accompanying notes 38-42.
187. See 1976 Act, supra note 6, § 304.
Thus, every extension of subsisting copyrights prior to the CTEA

conditioned the maximum copyright term upon the copyright holder satisfying
a renewal requirement. In contrast, the CTEA’s twenty-year extension of
subsisting copyrights was granted indiscriminately. But because the renewal
requirement survived in American law until the Copyright Renewal Act188
removed renewal entirely in 1992, the effect of this extension differed
dramatically depending upon the period during which the initial copyright was
granted.
For registered works published between January 1, 1923, and December
31, 1963, the CTEA extended the term of any subsisting copyright by twenty
years. But because the average renewal rate for works published between 1923
and 1963 was just 15%, 85% of the works originally copyrighted during that
period had already passed into the public domain. Thus, while the CTEA
extended the terms of subsisting copyrights, the filter of renewal had already
eliminated the vast majority of copyrights granted during this period from
copyright regulation. The burdens of copyright, therefore, were visited only on
those works that had passed through the renewal filter—i.e., only those works
for which continuing protection could be expected to provide some return for
the author to offset the social costs imposed by continued exclusivity.
For registered works published between January 1, 1964, and December
31, 1978, the CTEA extended the term of subsisting copyrights by the same
twenty years. But because the Copyright Renewal Act had granted an automatic
renewal to all subsisting copyrights not yet in their renewal term, the CTEA
extended the copyright term of a class of works in which, according to
historical data, approximately eighty-five percent of the copyrights would never
have been renewed. In contrast to the situation described above, the CTEA
visited the burdens of copyright protection on all works from our recent past,
including the majority that would not have passed through the renewal filter.
As a consequence, for a large percentage of these works, costs were imposed
without the promise of any offsetting benefit.
2. Formalities as a buffer between copyright and the First Amendment
In addition to the narrowed Intellectual Property Clause challenge, the

plaintiffs in Kahle press a related First Amendment attack. The Eldred Court
rejected the petitioners’ First Amendment claim based on a conclusion that the
CTEA “ha[d] not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection.”189
But “the traditional contours of copyright protection” in America established a
conditional copyright regime. Copyrights were granted, and maintained, only if
rightsholders took affirmative steps to secure their rights.
188. CAA, supra note 8, §§ 101-102.

As discussed above,190 these “traditional contours” of copyright protection

served important First Amendment interests. By requiring copyright owners to
signal a desire to continue the protection of copyright, the traditional
requirement of renewal limited copyright to just those works whose owners had
a sufficient continuing interest in restricting use of the works. Other works
were available for public use in creating new speech. Likewise, the registration
and notice requirements provided clarity by identifying the copyright holder
and the term of protection, thus facilitating the spread of knowledge through
use of public domain material and licensing of works still under copyright. Like
the doctrine of “fair use,” these structural limitations on the scope of
copyright’s regulation narrowly tailored the reach of the law to those contexts
within which copyright would act as an “engine of free expression.”191 The
registration and notice requirements also excluded copyright from those
contexts within which the regulation would simply act as a brake on free
expression.
These changes to the copyright laws, as they are applied to and affect a
large volume of creative work that would never have had its copyrights
renewed, do not advance any legitimate government interest. They instead
impose substantial burdens on speech without advancing the only legitimate
interest the government might have—namely, to continue returns to
rightsholders in the small minority of work that continues to have commercial
value, in the hope of maximizing incentives to produce creative work.192 In
particular, with respect to works created after January 1, 1964, and before
January 1, 1978, these changes have imposed an unconstitutional burden on
speech. The term for works created between January 1, 1964, and December
31, 1977, was extended by nineteen years by the 1976 Act. The term was then
automatically renewed by the Copyright Renewal Act in 1992. Finally, the term
was unconditionally extended by twenty years by the CTEA in 1998. Thus,
even though historical data suggests that more than eighty-five percent of these

191. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985).
192. The petitioners in Eldred argued that, unlike in the case of prospective term
extension, extension of subsisting copyrights could not possibly contribute to increased
incentive to invest in the creation of new works. Because existing works cannot be created
anew, it makes no sense to throw additional money at owners of subsisting copyrights. The
response of the Eldred majority to this commonsense observation is perhaps the weakest part
of its opinion. Given Congress’s repeated extensions of both new and subsisting copyrights,
the Court asserted, authors could reasonably expect to receive “a copyright not only for the
time in place when protection is gained, but also for any renewal or extension legislated
during that time.” 537 U.S. at 214-15. But given that the pre-CTEA copyright term of life of
the author plus fifty years already provided a return to the rightsholder that approached one
hundred percent of the net present value of a perpetual term, see supra text accompanying
note 134, it makes no sense to maintain that extension of subsisting copyrights provides any
additional inducement to authors.
works would never have had their copyrights renewed, the law automatically
extended their terms by sixty-seven years. This is the first category of
copyrighted works in U.S. history which has had its term extended
automatically without ever passing through the filter of renewal.
Because these changes have altered the “traditional contours” of copyright,
they should be evaluated under heightened First Amendment scrutiny. But even
under the less exacting rational basis standard, the burdens created by these
changes for certain categories of copyrighted works far outweigh any plausible
benefits.
E. Unconditional Copyright and U.S. Accession to the Berne Convention
The move from conditional to unconditional copyright is bad intellectual

property policy. It also threatens to bring copyright into conflict with the
Constitution. So what possessed us to do it? There were many factors,
including gripes about the difficulties of complying with formalities that were
often badly administered by the Copyright Office and the severe consequences
(i.e., loss of copyright protection) arising from failure to comply.193 But by far
the primary reason for the removal of copyright formalities was the desire on
the part of the content industries and their supporters in Congress to accede—
more than a century after its promulgation—to the Berne Convention.
1. The Berne Convention
The Berne Convention, which dates from 1886, was the fruit of
negotiations that had been proceeding since the first International Congress of
Authors and Artists met in Brussels in 1858.194 In its current form,195 the Berne
Convention obliges signatories to honor two basic principles: (1) a “national
treatment” principle reqiring all signatory nations to grant the same rights to
foreign authors that they grant to their own authors; and (2) a “baseline
protection” principle requiring signatory countries to adhere in their domestic
193. See, e.g., Copyright Law Revision, supra note 108, at 68 (statement of Abraham
L. Kaminstein, Register of Copyrights).
194. See Jane C. Ginsburg, International Copyright: From a “Bundle” of National
Copyright Laws to a Supranational Code?, 47 J. COPYRIGHT SOC’Y U.S.A. 265, 267 (2000).
195. The Berne Convention has been revised repeatedly; particular revisions are
referred to as “acts.” The group of countries that are signatories to the Convention, referred
to collectively as the “Berne Union,” has an existence separate from any particular act. When
the Convention is revised, Union members are not required to adhere to the new revision as a
condition to remaining within the Union. A country may join the Union at any time by
acceding to the most recent version of the Convention. The treaty obligations of any
particular Union member are measured by the terms of the particular act or acts to which that
member has acceded. See PAUL GOLDSTEIN, INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT 20-21 (2001).
law to certain minimum levels of protection as specified in the Convention.196

The Convention’s baseline requirements include a copyright term for works by
individual authors of life of the author plus fifty years,197 and a prohibition on
formalities that affect the “enjoyment and exercise” of copyright.198
In 1886, when the Convention was first promulgated, the United States had
not entered into a single copyright-related international agreement. The United
States entered the international copyright system in 1891, when it concluded
the first of a series of bilateral copyright agreements with France,199 Great
Britain,200 and Germany.201 In 1955, the United States acceded to the
Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), an instrument that established
multilateral copyright relations between signatories to the Berne Convention
and other nations, including the United States, that considered the Berne
Convention’s minimum standards incompatible with domestic law. As a
measure to accommodate the United States, the UCC allowed member states to
impose formalities as a condition of protection.202
The United States did not accede to the Berne Convention until 1989, and
the Convention’s prohibition of formalities is perhaps the primary reason that
the United States, alone among industrialized nations, remained outside the
Convention for its first century. Nonetheless, many U.S. authors secured the
Berne Convention’s benefits prior to U.S. accession by simultaneously
publishing their works in Canada, a Berne signatory.203 As Professor Graeme
Austin has noted, “Adoption of this practice by American authors wealthy or
sophisticated enough to do so ensured that many of the benefits of the
Convention accrued to American copyright industries. American society,
however, shouldered few of its burdens.”204
196. Berne Convention, supra note 14, art. 5(1). Under the Berne Convention’s “points
of attachment” rules, a work is entitled to Berne Convention protection in signatory nations
if its author is a national or domiciliary of a signatory state or if the work is first or
simultaneously published in a signatory state. See id. arts. 3(1)(a), 3(1)(b), 3(2).
197. Id. art. 7(1).
198. Id. art. 5(2).
199. Proclamation No. 3, 27 Stat. 981 (July 1, 1891).
200. Id.
201. Proclamation No. 24, 27 Stat. 1021 (Apr. 15, 1892).
202. Universal Copyright Convention, Geneva Text, Sept. 6, 1952, art. 3(2), 6 U.S.T.
2731, 2735, 216 U.N.T.S. 132, 136.
203. Graeme W. Austin, Does the Copyright Clause Mandate Isolationism?, 26
COLUM.-VLA J.L. & ARTS 17, 42 (2002).
204. Id. This “back door” to Berne has, since 1914, been subject to the power of Union
members to retaliate against authors who are nationals of non-Union countries but obtain
Berne protection through first publication in a Union country, if the author’s country of
nationality “fails to protect in an adequate manner the works of authors who are nationals of
one of the countries of the Union.” Berne Convention, supra note 14, art. 6(1).
2. Berne’s rule against formalities
Curiously, the Berne Convention allowed formalities at its inception,

providing that enjoyment of the rights prescribed by the Convention were
subject “to the accomplishment of the conditions and formalities prescribed by
law in the country of origin of the work.”205 By 1908, however, Berne had been
amended to provide that member countries must not condition the acquisition,
exercise, or enjoyment of copyright protection for the works of foreign authors
on the observance of any formality.206
The current version of the Convention’s prohibition against formalities is
set out in Article 5(2) of the 1971 Paris Act, which provides that
[t]he enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any
formality; such enjoyment and such exercise shall be independent of the
existence of protection in the country of the origin of the work. Consequently,
apart from the provisions of this Convention, the extent of protection, as well
as the means of redress afforded to the author to protect his rights, shall be
governed exclusively by the laws of the country where protection is
claimed.207
The term “formality” is not defined, but is understood in the sense of an
administrative obligation set out in a national law that imposes a condition
necessary for a copyright to exist, or for the right to continue or to be
practically available.208 Those provisions of U.S. law that provide for voluntary
formalities—i.e., voluntary notice, registration, and recordation of transfers—
and that provide incentives for compliance209 either apply only to U.S. works
(for example, in the case of the bar on bringing infringement litigation absent
registration, which was believed to negate the right to “exercise” the copyright
and thus to qualify as a prohibited formality under Berne210) or are not the type
of formality that Berne prohibits.211
205. Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Sept. 9, 1886,
art. 2(2), reprinted in ARPAD BOGSCH, BERNE CONVENTION FOR THE PROTECTION OF
LITERARY AND ARTISTIC WORKS, FROM 1886 TO 1986, at 228, 228 (World Intellectual Prop.
Org. Public’n No. 877(E), 1986) [hereinafter BERNE CONVENTION FROM 1886 TO 1896].
206. Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Berlin Act,
Nov. 13, 1908, art. 4(2), reprinted in BERNE CONVENTION FROM 1886 TO 1986, supra note
205, at 229, 229.
207. Berne Convention, supra note 14, art. 5(2).
208. WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROP. ORG., GUIDE TO THE BERNE CONVENTION FOR THE
PROTECTION OF LITERARY AND ARTISTIC WORKS (PARIS ACT, 1971) 33 (1978) [hereinafter
WIPO GUIDE]; see also SAM RICKETSON, THE BERNE CONVENTION FOR THE PROTECTION OF
LITERARY AND ARTISTIC WORKS: 1886-1986, at 222-23 (1987).
210. See STEPHEN M. STEWART, INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT AND NEIGHBOURING
RIGHTS 106 (1983) (“[T]he necessity to register before bringing an action would probably be
regarded as a ‘formality’ as it negates the ‘exercise’ of the right without such registration.”);
Mayer Gabay, The United States Copyright System and the Berne Convention, 26 BULL.
Importantly, although the terms of Article 5(2) bar the imposition of

formalities on foreign authors, signatory nations remain free to impose
formalities on the works of their own nationals.212 As the World Intellectual
Property Organization’s (WIPO) official exegesis of the Berne Convention
explains, the freedom from formalities provided by the Convention
exists independently of any protection that the work enjoys in its country of
origin. In fact, such country remains absolutely free to subordinate the
existence or exercise of the rights on that work in that country to such
conditions or formalities as it thinks fit: it is purely a matter of domestic
law.213
The United States’s accession to Berne, therefore, did not require the wholesale
removal of mandatory registration, notice, and recordation of transfers. Rather,
the application of these mandatory formalities could simply have been limited
to the works of U.S. authors, which have long comprised a large majority of
works published in the United States.214 Voluntary registration and notice
formalities, along with the current system of inducements to compliance, could
have been established for the works of foreign authors.
Though the matter is not free from doubt, there is also a strong argument
that Berne accession did not require the removal of mandatory renewal for U.S.
works. Article 7(1) of Berne prescribes a minimum term of protection for the
works of individual authors of life of the author plus fifty years.215 But it is
COPYRIGHT SOC’Y U.S.A. 202, 208 (1979) (“It is true that registration is ‘permissive’ and
does not, under the 1976 Act, constitute a condition precedent for acquisition of copyright.
But these factors merely give rise to a bare right that is incapable of being exercised in a
U.S. court of law until registration is effected.”).
211. The fact that registration affords successful infringement plaintiffs the opportunity
to collect statutory damages and attorney’s fees, for example, is not believed to violate the
Berne Convention, because that instrument does not itself require that a country provide for
such recoveries. See Gabay, supra note 210, at 209-10; Melville B. Nimmer, Implications of
the Prospective Revisions of the Berne Convention and the United States Copyright Law, 19
STAN. L. REV. 499, 514 (1967).
213. WIPO GUIDE, supra note 208, at 33. WIPO, one of the sixteen specialized
agencies of the United Nations system of organizations, is the principal forum for
negotiation of international intellectual property agreements. Headquartered in Geneva,
Switzerland, WIPO administers twenty-three international treaties dealing with different
aspects of intellectual property protection. WIPO counts 179 nations as member states. For
more information on WIPO’s mission, see World Intellectual Prop. Org., Medium-Term
Plan for WIPO Program Activities, at http://www.wipo.int/about-wipo/en/dgo/pub487.htm
(last visited Oct. 31, 2004).
214. See supra note 81.
215. Berne Convention, supra note 14, art. 7(1); see also id. art. 7(2) (establishing for
cinematographic works a minimum term of fifty years after publication, or, for unreleased
films, fifty years after production); id. art. 7(3) (establishing for anonymous and
pseudonymous works a minimum term of fifty years after publication); id. art. 7(4)
(establishing for photographs and works of applied art a minimum term of twenty-five years
following a work’s production in countries that protect these types of works).
clear that Berne members may impose a registration formality on domestic

authors—i.e., they can condition the enjoyment of any portion of the minimum
term for native works upon registration. Similarly, Berne member states should
be able to condition enjoyment for native authors of some portion of the
“minimum” term on compliance with the formality. In both instances, the law
would continue to offer a Berne-compliant minimum term.
3. Berne’s “practical hostility” to formalities
Why does the Berne Convention prohibit the imposition of formalities on

foreign authors? The response most often has been made at the level of
copyright theory: that formalities are out of step with the natural rights theory
of copyright, which has been characterized as the “Grundnorm” of the Berne
Convention.216
That explanation is deeply unsatisfying, for the degree to which formalities
are inconsistent with natural rights-based copyright is easily overstated. Even
the nations of continental Europe, whose copyright systems are most closely
identified with a natural rights framework, do not provide for perpetual
copyright, but balance authors’ rights with the public interest in the
advancement of learning.217 Consequently, even in so-called “natural rights”
systems, copyrights expire, works enter the public domain, and the law
therefore must seek some form of “utilitarian” balance between private
incentives and public access. Indeed, even in a system that imposed a perpetual
copyright, requiring registration and notice would nonetheless be a sensible
step. As has been detailed above, a reliable and easily accessed ownership
registry encourages transfers and licensing by lowering the cost to the would-be
transferee or licensee of identifying rightsholders. A system focused on returns
to authors should therefore seek to maximize authors’ rewards with modest
investments in administrative mechanisms, such as a registry, that reduce
transaction costs.
216. Alan Story, Burn Berne: Why the Leading International Copyright Convention
Must Be Repealed, 40 HOUS. L. REV. 763, 771 (2003); see also Hesse, supra note 139, at 40
(“[Berne] tended to strengthen universalist claims for protection of inviolable natural rights
against statutory limits imposed by particular nations on utilitarian grounds.”).
217. The European Union required member nations to adopt a uniform life-plus-
seventy term in a 1996 directive. Council Directive 93/98/EEC of 29 October 1993
Harmonizing the Term of Protection of Copyright and Certain Related Rights, 1993 O.J. (L
290) 9 [hereinafter EU Directive]. The EU Directive has now become the global benchmark.
It was cited as a factor in the CTEA’s installment of an identical term in U.S. law, see Eldred
v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 195-96 (2003), and is reflected in domestic legislation in a
number of countries both within and outside Europe, see Shauna C. Bryce, Life Plus
Seventy: The Extension of Copyright Terms in the European Union and Proposed
Legislation in the United States, 37 HARV. INT’L L.J. 525, 529 (1996).
Again, there is no sharp disjunction between “natural rights” and

“utilitarian” copyright systems in the manner one would expect if copyright
were driven by theory rather than exigency. The primary difference between
the utilitarian and natural rights approaches is which side of the balance is
emphasized. Formalities could play an important role in any system of limited-
term copyrights in maximizing copyright’s social utility by focusing protection.
So how are we to explain Berne’s aversion to formalities? The simplest and
best explanation is much more prosaic than the one commonly offered. The
overarching purpose of the Berne Convention is to provide protection to
authors whose works will be published in many countries. Perhaps the most
practically important element of that protection—more important for the
protection of authors’ interests than establishing a minimum copyright term—is
to avoid the necessity that authors comply with mandatory formalities in every
country in which their works are published or may be found. Berne’s
proscription of mandatory formalities is a rational response to the difficulty of
complying (and maintaining compliance) with differently administered
formalities that may have been, absent the Convention, imposed in dozens of
national systems, some with registries, some without, and none of which shares
information.
Evidence for this view can be found in the origins of the Berne
Convention. The first stirrings of a movement toward an international copyright
system were felt at the 1858 Brussels Conference on Literary and Artistic
Property, which was organized by a group of Belgian authors and academics
and attended by representatives from each major European country and the
United States.218 The Brussels Conference passed a series of resolutions
establishing the rough outlines of an international copyright system. Among
those resolutions was one directing that authors should be required to comply
with formalities only in their home countries.219 The domestic law of many
countries at that time required compliance with formalities as a condition of
protection.220
This initial approach of limiting formalities to an author’s home country
was adopted in additional instruments preceding Berne, including the 1878
resolutions of the “Paris Congress,” which was presided over by Victor
Hugo.221 It was also the approach taken in the initial text of the Berne
Convention itself,222 which included a provision setting out evidentiary
presumptions designed to assist authors in establishing before foreign tribunals
218. See RICKETSON, supra note 208, at 41-42.

219. Id. at 42-43.
220. Id. at 201.
221. Id. at 46-47.
their compliance with home-country formalities.223 So why, in the revisions to

Berne adopted in Berlin in 1908, did the Convention move from a limited
acceptance of formalities to a broader proscription?
Professor Sam Ricketson identifies a number of reasons, including the
difficulty that authors faced, even with the assistance of the evidentiary
presumptions, in proving home-country compliance.224 In addition, there was a
broader interpretive problem: despite the signatories’ clear intent that an
author’s compliance with formalities in his home country was sufficient to gain
protection under the domestic law of all Berne signatories, some national
tribunals, interpreting the Convention as prohibiting formalities imposed by
domestic law only on foreign authors, took the view that the works of foreign
authors were subject to the same formalities imposed on native works.225 In
1896, the French government proposed an amendment to the Convention that
would clarify the matter, but the Berne nations ultimately agreed only to an
Interpretive Declaration—i.e., an “authentic interpretation rather than a new
disposition”—along the lines the French had proposed.226 It was these practical
problems in administering Berne’s original approach to formalities that drove
the eventual decision to move to a complete ban.
This observation is helpful in better understanding the Berne Convention,
but, more usefully for our purposes here, it also has important implications for
the status of formalities in U.S. copyright law. In deciding whether a particular
formality interferes with the “enjoyment and . . . exercise” of copyright, and
thereby runs afoul of Article 5(2) of the Convention, it is important to
understand that Berne’s antiformality principle does not arise from any
supposed foundational incompatibility between formalities and an authors’
rights copyright framework. We will turn now to consider how formalities may
be reintroduced into the U.S. system, in light of both the problems that Berne
was trying to solve and technological developments that now allow much less
burdensome approaches to solving the same problems.
III. REFORMALIZING COPYRIGHT
A. Defining “Interoperable” Formalities in the Berne Convention
Berne’s prohibition of formalities dates from 1908, a time in which

requiring authors to comply with formalities in the many countries in which a
work may be published—i.e., requiring an author (or publisher) to inform
himself about the requirements of the law in countries with which he has no
223. RICKETSON, supra note 208, at 202-03.

224. Id.
225. Id. at 201.
226. Id. at 85-86.
familiarity, and then to obtain and fill out forms in a variety of languages—
would be difficult, expensive, and often result in unintentional noncompliance
and the loss of valuable rights. Article 5(2) of the current Paris Text of the
Berne Convention was promulgated in 1971, but the nature of the problem had
not changed in the intervening sixty-three years: copyright systems remained
substantively and procedurally diverse, the mechanisms of compliance in many
countries remained balky, and the costs of informing oneself about
requirements in different countries, and then complying with them, remained
high.
Since 1971, however, there has been a series of technological changes that
could make compliance with a redesigned set of formalities quick and easy.
Those changes involve, of course, computers and the Internet. Now it is
possible for an author publishing a work internationally to comply with
formalities in his or her home country, or in the country of a work’s first
publication, and to have the data generated by that compliance formatted and
transmitted reliably and nearly costlessly to other jurisdictions. But changes in
technology alone are not enough—changes to the law are also required. To
make compliance cheap, the law must ensure that data generated in one
jurisdiction will be sufficient to permit compliance in any jurisdiction that
chooses to reintroduce formalities into its domestic copyright laws.
The simplest way to take advantage of what technology now allows would
be to propose a new Berne text that removes the prohibition in Article 5(2) of
the current Paris Act and replaces it with a provision allowing member
countries to impose formalities, provided that they adhere to a set of standards
that make formalities “interoperable” across jurisdictions.227 What would the
changes to the Berne Convention look like?
1. The reciprocity principle
The most direct approach would install a “reciprocity principle” alongside

the existing national treatment and minimum standards principles that now
drive Berne. The reciprocity principle would require that all Berne jurisdictions
227. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) also contains provisions
related to intellectual property. See, e.g., North American Free Trade Agreement, Dec. 17,
1992, U.S.-Can.-Mex., arts. 1708 (trademark), 1709 (patent), 1710 (semiconductor design),
1711 (trade secrets), 32 I.L.M. 605, 672-75 (implemented by 107 Stat. 2057). In particular,
NAFTA Article 1703(2) mirrors the Berne Article 5(2) proscription of formalities, and must
likewise be modified to permit reformalization of domestic law in the United States. NAFTA
Article 1703(2) provides that “[n]o Party may, as a condition of according national treatment
under this Article, require rights holders to comply with any formalities or conditions in
order to acquire rights in respect of copyright and related rights.” Id. art. 1703(2). Since
NAFTA signatories Canada, Mexico, and the United States are all parties to a text of the
Berne Convention that prohibits formalities, NAFTA Article 1703(2) is largely duplicative
of Berne on the issue of formalities.
that impose formalities permit foreign authors to comply with formalities in

their national laws by complying with formalities either in their home country
or in the work’s country of first publication or registration. The reciprocity
principle would not require any particular Berne nation to impose formalities—
i.e., it would not modify Berne’s current minimum standards requirements. It
would, rather, require only that Berne nations that choose to reformalize their
domestic copyright laws do so according to standards set out in Berne.
Some nations may, of course, choose not to reintroduce formalities into
their domestic law. But if some Berne Union countries have formalities, and
others do not, the possibility arises that the home country of an author, or the
nation of first publication of his work, will not have a registration requirement
to which other Berne countries with formalities can grant reciprocity. To
accommodate authors in this category who wish to comply with formalities
across Berne jurisdictions, the Berne nations should also establish a centralized
WIPO registry, subject to the same standards agreed upon by Berne members
and subject also to the condition that all Berne nations will grant reciprocity.
To make the reciprocity principle practically workable, Berne signatories
would enter into a side agreement that would standardize across jurisdictions
the data required to register a copyright and standardize formatting of that data
so that registration information—authors’ names and addresses, creation and
registration dates, etc.—may readily be shared among jurisdictions. Berne
signatories could then establish an information-sharing agreement whereby
registration data obtained in one country could be made available to other
jurisdictions, at the rightsholder’s discretion. As the secretariat for the Berne
Union, WIPO would be well placed to coordinate the actual transfer of data
among Berne members.
Taking this approach, it is not necessary to amend Berne to prescribe a
minimum set of formalities. It would suffice, rather, simply to remove the
Article 5(2) prohibition, to install the reciprocity principle, to work out a set of
standards to ensure interoperability, and then to leave to the member states the
decision whether to reinstall formalities or not.
2. The reciprocity principle and neighboring rights agreements
For countries that, unlike the United States, do not include protection for
performances, sound recordings (also referred to as “phonograms”), and
broadcasts in their copyright laws, but locate them instead in separate
“neighboring rights” statutes, reformalization of domestic law must include
changes to the law governing both types of rights. Similarly, the same
reciprocity principle that would be installed into the Berne Convention must
also be introduced into the applicable international agreements governing
neighboring rights—an issue of some complexity.
The principal international agreement defining protection of neighboring

rights is the 1961 International Convention for the Protection of Performers,
Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations, also known as the
Rome Convention.228 This instrument extends Berne-style national treatment
and minimum rights principles to neighboring rights, although the minimum
terms established are shorter.229 Unlike Berne Article 5(2), Article 11 of the
Rome Convention does not prohibit signatories from conditioning protection of
neighboring rights on formalities. Article 11 provides, however, that any
signatory that conditions protection for performers on, or producers of,
phonograms on compliance with formalities must permit its requirements to be
met by affixing a prescribed notice to the recording or its container. Adoption
of the reciprocity principle, therefore, would require replacement of the rule
allowing blanket compliance through notice with formalities pertaining to
protection of phonograms.
The 1973 Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms
Against Unauthorized Distribution of Their Phonograms, referred to as the
Geneva Phonograms Convention, which is aimed at cross-border record piracy,
requires signatories to protect qualifying phonogram producers “against the
making of duplicates without the consent of the producer and against the
importation of such duplicates, provided that any such making or importation is
for the purpose of distribution to the public, and against the distribution of such
duplicates to the public.”230 Like the Rome Convention, the Geneva
Phonograms Convention allows signatories to impose formalities as a condition
of protection for phonograms, but provides that affixation of notice must
suffice to comply with all mandatory formalities.231 Thus, the same changes
that would be required to the Rome Convention must also be applied to the
Geneva Phonograms Convention.
Now that we have seen what changes to international law are necessary to
shift the treatment of formalities from hostility (Berne), or at best, grudging
acceptance (Rome and Geneva), to acceptance with reciprocity, let us briefly
228. International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of

Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, Oct. 26, 1961, 12 U.S.T. 2377, 496 U.N.T.S.
43.
229. Article 14 of the Rome Convention established minimum twenty-year terms for
both phonograms and performances, measured either from the date of performance (for
unfixed performances) or from the date of fixation (for performances recorded on
phonograms). Id. art. 14. Article 17 of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty,
Dec. 20, 1996, S. TREATY DOC. NO. 105-17, 36 I.L.M. 65 (1996), and Article 14(5) of
TRIPs, supra note 16, extend these minimum terms to fifty years. TRIPs Article 14(5) also
imposes a minimum twenty-year term for broadcasts. Id. art. 14(5).
230. Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized
Duplication of Their Phonograms, Oct. 29, 1971, art. 2, 25 U.S.T. 309, 325, 866 U.N.T.S.
67, 72.
231. Id. art. 5.
examine how such a system would work with respect to each of the familiar
types of formalities.
3. The reciprocity principle in practice
Registration. The application of the reciprocity principle to the registration

formality is comparatively straightforward. Once a work is registered in one
jurisdiction (or with the centralized WIPO registry), it would be registered in
all Berne Union jurisdictions that have reinstalled a registration formality in
their domestic law.
Recordation of transfers. The same scheme established for registration
should also apply to recordation of transfers—a transfer that is successfully
recorded in one jurisdiction (or with the WIPO registry) should suffice to
record that transfer in all jurisdictions in which the work previously has been
registered.
Notice. Berne Union nations would be free, under the reciprocity principle,
to require that notice be given for some or all works. Of course, if a Berne
nation creates an effective, easily accessible copyright registry, there is little to
be gained by also requiring notice: the registry should provide enough
information to make the tracing of copyright ownership simple and cheap.232 In
the instance, however, that some Berne signatories choose to include a notice
requirement in their reformalized domestic law, the signatories should agree to
standardize the form of notice for different types of works to ensure (1) that no
more information is required to be elicited to comply with notice requirements
than was supplied to complete registration, and (2) that the same form of notice
that suffices in one jurisdiction for any particular type of work will also be
accepted throughout the Berne Union. These rules would prevent differing
standards for notice that might cause unintentional loss of rights. They would
also encourage publication with the standardized form of notice even in those
jurisdictions that do not require it as a condition of protection.
Renewal. Creating a renewal formality that is interoperable across
jurisdictions raises a number of somewhat more complex problems, but should
be achievable with an increased level of coordination among Berne members.
The first problem is whether, in order to permit Berne nations to reinstall the
renewal formality, a revised Berne Convention would have to remove the
provision in the current version of Berne requiring all signatories to grant a
232. Indeed, because notice on existing works usually cannot be updated, notice can
give misleading information regarding current ownership. For countries that choose to
require notice, the marking requirement should be refocused to provide would-be users with
information facilitating access to the registry, where the most up-to-date information on
ownership would be available.
minimum copyright term of life of the author plus fifty years.233 The answer is
likely no. Berne’s prohibition of formalities is contained in an article separate
from its minimum term requirements. Remove the current ban on formalities,
and nothing in the Convention specifies that the term, if offered equally to
every author, must be enjoyed in full by every author without condition.
The second problem is a more practical one: how to coordinate renewal
across jurisdictions when different Berne member states may impose renewal
requirements at different points in the copyright term. A simple application of
the reciprocity principle threatens to create substantial confusion. If a
rightsholder who complies with the renewal formality in the jurisdiction in
which a work was first registered is deemed to have complied with renewal in
any jurisdiction in which a renewal is required, then absent detailed knowledge
of the point at which renewal may be required in a potentially large number of
Berne jurisdictions, a would-be user will find it difficult to determine whether a
work has been timely renewed.
For example, suppose that a work is first registered in country A, which
imposes a renewal requirement at thirty years. Twenty-five years into the
work’s term, a would-be user in country B inquires whether the work is in the
public domain. Country B imposes a renewal formality at fifteen years. The
user sees that the work was registered twenty-five years ago; under country B’s
law, the work would have passed into the public domain when the rightsholder
failed to timely renew. But under country A’s laws, the work is still in its initial
term; renewal will not be required for another five years. Accordingly, under a
simple application of the reciprocity principle, unless the user understands (1)
where the work was first registered, (2) when the renewal requirement occurs
in that jurisdiction, and (3) that country A’s renewal requirement is the relevant
one, the user will not easily be able to determine whether the work is in the
public domain.
These information problems can be mitigated, of course, even if they
cannot be eliminated. The standardized registration and notice format should
include information on the nation of the work’s first registration, and that
information should be made available in all online registry sites maintained in
the various Berne nations. In addition, Berne signatories should be encouraged
to disseminate information about the rules governing renewal, and how to
determine which renewal term applies to a particular work. Taken together,
these measures might mean that the benefit, in terms of the simplicity of a
straightforward application of the reciprocity principle to renewal, outweighs
the cost in terms of the increased complexity of determining the status of rights.
An alternative, which would require a greater degree of coordination
among Berne nations, would be to standardize renewal terms for all
jurisdictions that reinstall a renewal formality in their domestic law. The
233. See supra note 215.

reciprocity principle would then apply to grant automatic compliance with all
Berne nations’ renewal requirements based on timely compliance with the
requirement in the country of first registration, or by renewing with WIPO, if
original registration was made with the WIPO registry. Based on the
depreciation calculations made by Landes and Posner, the Berne nations could
impose more than one renewal obligation during the copyright term. A first
renewal obligation set at ten years would move approximately 50% of
registered works into the public domain. A second renewal requirement set in
the vicinity of forty-three years would result in only 10% of the number of
originally registered works remaining under copyright. A third renewal
requirement set at sixty-five years would move all but 1% of the number of
originally registered works into the public domain. The works left under
copyright after sixty-five years would be those of truly enduring commercial
value for which the full term of copyright would be likely to provide significant
continuing benefits.
B. Defining “New-Style” Berne-Compliant Formalities
If changing Berne to explicitly permit formalities is not possible, is there

still a way to reformalize U.S. domestic law? There are several alternatives of
varying merit. The next few pages will first briefly discuss two long-shot
possibilities: the reintroduction of formalities for U.S. (but not foreign) authors
and U.S. withdrawal from Berne (which, for reasons that will quickly become
obvious, this Article does not recommend). I then focus on an alternative that
seems much more sensible: the reintroduction into U.S. law of “new-style”
formalities that provide the benefits of traditional formalities, but that do not
run afoul of Berne’s proscription of conditions that interfere with the “exercise
and enjoyment” of copyright.
1. Reintroducing old-style formalities for U.S. authors
Because Berne does not prevent signatories from imposing formalities on

the works of domestic authors or authors from non-Berne signatory nations, the
United States could have retained a full set of traditional formalities for those
works. In fact, an advisory group established by the Department of State to
assess what changes to U.S. law would be necessary for Berne accession
advocated this position, as part of a more broadly minimalist approach to the
implementation of Berne that sought to alter only those portions of U.S. law
that the group deemed clearly irreconcilable with the Convention.234
234. See Final Report, supra note 45, app. A at 622 (1986) (“[W]e have proposed what
we think are minimal amendments to the law, only where change is clearly required, based
upon widely shared understandings of Berne obligations . . . . A number of the alternatives
The minimalist approach of restricting unconditional copyright to foreign

authors is, for reasons that are not difficult to imagine (e.g., the antipathy to
granting foreign authors more rights than U.S. authors), not the approach that
Congress took. Whether the politics of copyright are likely ever to shift in a
way that would make the minimalist approach to unconditional copyright
viable is a question beyond the scope of this Article. It is worth noting,
however, that restricting unconditional copyright to foreign works would
represent a significant improvement on the status quo without creating any risk
of noncompliance with Berne.
2. Withdrawal from Berne and reliance on the Universal Copyright

Convention
Because the United States is a signatory to the UCC, and because before it
acceded to Berne the United States negotiated bilateral copyright agreements
with several nations that were not UCC signatories, it would be possible for the
United States to withdraw from Berne and rely instead on the UCC, which,
unlike Berne, allows the imposition of formalities for the works of both
domestic and foreign authors. This strategy would, however, impose
unacceptable costs, the largest of which would arise from our resulting
noncompliance with the TRIPs accord, which incorporates by reference
Berne’s standards, and with the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which replicates Berne’s ban on formalities. Although its
applicability is subject to considerable debate, it is also possible that a
provision of Berne’s Appendix Declaration would prevent U.S. authors from
claiming the benefits of the UCC in countries that are Berne signatories.235
A further cost of withdrawal would arise from Berne Article 6(1), which
permits Berne nations to restrict the protection accorded to works of authors
who are nationals of a non-Berne country that “fails to protect in an adequate
manner the works of [Berne nationals].”236 There is little commentary on this
provision, so it is difficult to forecast whether subjecting foreign works to
formalities (at least formalities that do not discriminate between domestic and
foreign works, and for which compliance is easy and cheap) would rise to the
level of a “fail[ure] to protect in an adequate manner” the rights of foreign
authors.
we propose for consideration seek to exploit the distinction in treatment between works of
foreign and national origin permitted by the Berne Convention.”).
235. RICKETSON, supra note 208, at 856.
3. Indefinitely renewable copyright
Landes and Posner have proposed a system of indefinitely renewable

copyrights—i.e., a perpetual copyright term, conditioned on periodic
renewal.237 Landes and Posner suggest that such a system would result in more
works entering the public domain more quickly; their conclusions in this regard
are very likely correct. The Landes and Posner proposal is subject, however, to
two critiques: the first is significant, and the second, for my purposes, is
determinative.
First, a system of indefinitely renewable copyrights would prevent any
work of enduring commercial value (many of which would also have important
cultural value) from ever entering the public domain. For reasons explained
above, extending copyright indefinitely for valuable works raises the cost of
transformative use of these works and would give rightsholders a perpetual
veto power over uses they don’t like. These cultural and First Amendment costs
are not balanced by countervailing benefits. Because the current regime of
limited but very long copyright terms gives rightsholders virtually the same
return (from a net present value perspective) as would be produced under a
perpetual term, a shift to perpetual copyright for valuable works would yield no
significant enhancement to the incentive to create.
Landes and Posner also discuss a series of limited-term options conditioned
on repeated renewal requirements. These avoid the first objection, but they do
not avoid the second: because they employ an old-style renewal formality (i.e.,
one that results in termination of rights for failure to comply), and because none
of the proposals would guarantee a minimum term of life plus fifty years, all
versions of the Landes and Posner approach would require the United States to
withdraw from the Berne Convention.238 The authors make note of the
incompatibility of their proposal with Berne,239 but their concerns, unlike mine,
are focused solely on the economic effects of the proposal, not on its
consequences for U.S. participation in the international copyright system.240
237. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, ch. 8; William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner,
Indefinitely Renewable Copyright, 70 U. CHI. L. REV. 471 (2003).
238. Incompatibility with Berne’s rule against formalities could be avoided, of course,
by limiting the proposal to works of U.S. authors. But even such a limitation would not
prevent incompatibility with the life-plus-fifty minimum term requirement, which applies to
all works.
239. LANDES & POSNER, supra note 1, at 215 n.15.
240. In a forthcoming article, William Patry and Richard Posner argue that the
problems created by ever-longer copyright terms in a deformalized system should be
addressed by expanding the fair use doctrine to immunize use of works where a reasonable
inquiry fails to identify a rightsholder from whom a license may be sought. William F. Patry
& Richard A. Posner, Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred, 92 CAL. L. REV.
(forthcoming 2004) (working draft on file with author). The Patry and Posner article does
not attempt to describe in any detail what a “reasonable inquiry” is, or how reasonableness
4. The Public Domain Enhancement Act
Another possible approach is set out in a bill currently before Congress, the
Public Domain Enhancement Act (PDEA).241 Sponsored by Representative
Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, the PDEA would give copyright owners
of works by U.S. authors unfettered rights for fifty years. At that point the
copyright holder would be required to file a notice of continuation and pay a $1
fee every ten years to continue the copyright. Because only a small number of
works would retain any commercial value at the expiry of the minimum term,
most copyright owners would not bother to file a notice of continuation and pay
the fee. On September 4, 2003, the PDEA was referred to the House
Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. There it has
languished.
Unlike the Posner and Landes proposal, the PDEA is very likely
compatible with Berne. The renewal requirement is limited to the works of U.S.
authors, thereby avoiding conflict with Berne’s rule against formalities.
Although the renewal provision may cut off a work’s copyright prior to the
expiration of Berne’s minimum term, that should not, for the reasons given
above, cause Berne noncompliance.242 Nonetheless, the PDEA is vulnerable to
the critique that its effect is limited to tinkering around the margins: A large
percentage of works are commercially valueless at inception or have an initial
value that is quickly depleted. All of these works, however, would continue
under the PDEA to be subject to a very long copyright term. While fifty years
is certainly better than life plus seventy years, it may reasonably be asked
whether the game is worth the candle.
5. New-style formalities
A fifth option, and by far the most attractive, is to formulate and install in
U.S. law a set of new-style formalities that apply to both domestic and foreign
works. New-style formalities would provide the filtering and information-
creation benefits of traditional formalities. However, there is a good argument
that, if structured properly, new-style formalities would not affect copyright’s
might be assessed in particular cases. The uncertainty attending a “reasonableness” standard,

combined with the investments that would be required to undertake searches in every
instance, suggests that expanding fair use would be a more costly and less effective solution
than direct reformalization. In addition, the expansion of fair use to immunize users unable
to identify rightsholders following a “reasonable inquiry” would raise a separate issue of
Berne compliance. Berne Articles 10 and 10bis narrowly circumscribe the type of fair use
rules that signatories may establish in domestic legislation. Although a full analysis of these
provisions is outside the scope of this Article, suffice it to say that the Berne status of the fair
use expansion proposed by Patry and Posner will be subject to debate.
241. H.R. 2601, 108th Cong. (2003).
“enjoyment and exercise,” and would, therefore, comply with our Berne
obligations under the current Paris Act. This approach is attractive because it
would require changes only to U.S. law; Berne, TRIPs, and the other
international agreements that govern copyright and neighboring rights would
remain undisturbed. Integrating new-style formalities with the current text of
the Berne Convention does, however, raise several significant questions.
First, exactly what is a condition that interferes with the “enjoyment and
exercise” of copyright? A solid starting point is that that language at least
means that failure to comply with a formality cannot formally terminate the
right, or prevent it from arising in the first place. It is unclear how much further
“enjoyment and exercise” goes than that; I will return to this problem later.
Assuming for the moment that Article 5(2) allows a range of options short
of formal nullification of copyright, we are still faced with a difficult problem:
new-style formalities have to create a sufficient incentive for compliance to
construct a reliable record of ownership and to reliably signal copyright status,
but cannot use the forfeiture of rights to incent compliance.
The simplest solution would be to preserve formally voluntary registration,
notice, and recordation of transfers (and reestablish a formally voluntary
renewal formality) for all works, including works of foreign authors, but then
incent compliance by exposing the works of noncompliant rightsholders to a
“default” license that allows use for a predetermined fee. The royalty payable
under the default license would be low. Ideally, the royalty to license a work
that a rightsholder has failed to register, notice, reregister in the case of a
transfer (i.e., record), or renew should be set to approximate the cost of
complying with these formalities (i.e., the total cost of informing oneself about
the details of compliance and then satisfying them). That way a rightsholder
who expects his work to produce revenue exceeding the cost of complying with
the relevant formality will prefer to comply with the formality, whereas a
rightsholder who expects his work to produce revenue amounting to less than
the cost of compliance will prefer to expose his work to the default license.
(The rare rightsholder who estimates the likely revenues from his work to be
equal to the cost of complying with the formality will be indifferent between
compliance and exposure to the license.)
This system of formally voluntary formalities plus default licenses—which
I have referred to previously as “new-style” formalities—establishes indirectly
what the traditional system of compulsory formalities did directly: it eases
access to commercially valueless works for which protection (or the
continuation of protection) serves no purpose and focuses the system on those
works for which protection is needed to ensure that the rightsholder is able to
appropriate the commercial value of the expression. For the filtering function to
work, of course, the government would have to maintain an easily accessible
and up-to-date public registry. Given current computer database and search
technology, this would not be difficult.
Importantly, the use of default licenses in a system of new-style formalities

avoids the general objection to the compulsory licensing of intellectual property
goods: the need for a legislature, agency, or court to set a price for the license
in the absence of market negotiations. With respect to the particular use of
default licenses proposed here, compliance with the formalities—or the failure
to comply—serves as a price signal. Failure to comply means that the
rightsholder places a minimal value on the right, a value no greater than the
cost of compliance. That is all we need to know about works for which
rightsholders fail to comply with formalities. And by exposing these works to a
default license, we are giving these rightsholders nothing less than what they
themselves expect in term of returns. The system of default licenses is therefore
efficient: it removes transaction costs that would otherwise frequently prevent
use, while charging an approximately optimal price (i.e., near zero) for a
license. With respect to works for which rightsholders comply with formalities,
the market continues to set the prices of licenses.
Default licenses can be analogized to the “penalty defaults” of the type
proposed by Ian Ayres and Robert Gertner as gap-filling rules for incomplete
contracts.243 Default rules in contract theory are intended to fill gaps in
contracts by providing the parties with what they likely would have contracted
for. “Penalty defaults” are gap-filling rules that are designed to give at least one
party to the contract an incentive to contract around the default and therefore to
choose affirmatively a preferred contract provision. Penalty defaults are
purposefully designed to impose what the parties would not want, in order to
encourage the parties to negotiate the solution that they do want. Importantly,
penalty defaults incent contracting parties to reveal information to one another
that might not be revealed otherwise.
Although Ayres and Gertner formulate and apply their theory of penalty
defaults in the contract law context, the theory can be applied in the intellectual
property context as well. The default licenses that back new-style formalities
are a kind of penalty default rule, in that they are precisely the outcome that the
owner of a valuable copyright would not desire. The existence of the license
encourages owners of certain works to produce information that might not be
produced otherwise—i.e., that their works are sufficiently valuable that
continued copyright protection makes sense.
This system of voluntary formalities backed with default licenses raises an
immediate question: do they comply with the Berne Convention (and, thereby,
with TRIPs)? Although there are arguments both ways, I believe that the better
reading of Berne would permit new-style formalities.
Article 5(2) and economic rights. The first issue is whether new-style
formalities offend the Berne Article 5(2) proscription of formalities that
243. Ian Ayres & Robert Gertner, Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic
Theory of Default Rules, 99 YALE L.J. 87, 97-98 (1989).
interfere with the “enjoyment and exercise” of copyright. There are two senses
in which that phrase may be interpreted. The first relates to enjoyment and
exercise of the author’s economic rights. Under Article 9(1) of the Berne
Convention, authors of literary and artistic works have the exclusive right of
authorizing the reproduction of those works “in any manner or form.” This
includes traditional photocopying, digital copying, or any other form of
copying of the entire work or any part thereof. These exclusive rights include,
as a necessary corollary, the right to refuse to authorize reproduction of a
protected work. This right to exclude is the mainspring of the author’s
economic right: by restricting reproduction, the author may reduce output of his
work and thereby realize supracompetitive returns if his work lacks ready
substitutes.
Nevertheless, authors who fail to comply with new-style formalities and
thereby lose their previously existing right to exclude are likely not, as a
category, deprived of any aspect of the “enjoyment and exercise” of the
economic rights appertaining to their copyright. An author who fails to comply
with new-style formalities is merely converting an entitlement that is initially
protected by a property right (the right to exclude, realized through injunctions
and infringement damages) into an entitlement protected by a liability right (the
right to recover revenues from use via a default license).244 Even though new-
style formalities set up the liability rule as the default, and require authors to
opt out to preserve their ability to exploit the property rule, the system—unlike
the usual system of compulsory licenses—is still voluntary. And if the royalty
payable under the license is set correctly, owners of copyrights with projected
values lower than the cost of complying with a formality should actually prefer
the liability right as a means of exploiting their copyrights.
Creating an exploitation option based on a liability rule is a modest
extension of what the current regime provides. In the copyright system we have
now, rightsholders are allowed to choose the best approaches within the
existing set of property rules for exploiting their copyrights, whether via
exclusion and collection of infringement damages, a program of licensing and
collection of license royalties, or a mixture of the two. New-style formalities
would expand the existing process by establishing a liability rule option in the
form of a default license for works not valuable enough to justify customized
licensing. Again, whether the default license applies is within the control of the
rightsholder, and therefore a rightsholder’s decision to rely on that liability rule,
rather than on a property rule, to protect the enjoyment and exercise of his
copyright is not a forfeiture of rights. It is, rather, a signal that a particular
rightsholder believes that a one-size-fits-all liability rule based on a default
license is preferable, because of low transaction costs, to a property right
244. See Guido Calabresi & A. Douglas Melamed, Property Rules, Liability Rules, and
Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral, 85 HARV. L. REV. 1089, 1092-93 (1972).
exploited through (expensive) customized licensing or enforced through

(expensive and protracted) infringement litigation.
The function of new-style formalities, in sum, would be to establish
decision points at which rightsholders would be obliged to choose whether to
stay within the typical system of property rules or to switch to a liability rule as
the means to exercise and enjoy their copyright. Thus, new-style formalities do
not touch on the existence or continuation of copyright, but merely on the
manner in which rights are exploited. The difference is important, as the WIPO
commentary to Article 5(2) makes clear: “what is at issue here is the
recognition and scope of protection and not the various possible ways of
exploiting the rights given by the law.”245
Of course, the “signal” that authors send via compliance or noncompliance
with new-style formalities is unlikely to accurately reflect the underlying value
of a work in every instance. Some authors will doubtless underestimate the
future revenues that their works may bring in, and will mistakenly opt not to
comply with formalities and expose their work to a default license. It is
important to note that the possibility of error cuts both ways: some authors will
mistakenly opt to invest in compliance with formalities for works that are
unlikely to produce revenues greater than the cost of compliance. But despite
the certainty that some authors will make the wrong decision, it is nonetheless
true that authors (and assigns such as publishers) are the parties best placed to
decide whether the likely returns from a particular work are great enough to
merit investment in compliance with formalities, so the signal-to-noise ratio is
likely to be usefully high. In any event, if an author is uncertain regarding his
work’s future value, he retains the option of making the relatively small
investment required to comply with formalities as a form of insurance against
incorrectly valuing his asset.
There is a rejoinder to these arguments that proceeds from a different view
of what exactly Berne protects the “enjoyment and exercise” of. What Berne
protects, this objection would argue, is not the author’s overall ability to exploit
his copyright, but something more specific: the enjoyment and exercise of an
author’s right to exclude, a right that is granted in Article 9(1) of the
Convention as well as in domestic law. The right to exclude, according to this
objection, is not merely an initial entitlement, but is the subject of Berne’s
protection for the entire term of copyright. Accordingly, even if rightsholders
are free to alienate their right to exclude (via, for example, a voluntary license
or a dedication to the public domain), Berne prohibits governments from
conditioning the right to exclude on compliance with a formality. Berne
prohibits, in other words, using noncompliance with a formality as a trigger to
shift a work from property rule to liability rule status.
245. WIPO Guide, supra note 208, at 33.

This is a colorable argument, but is, I believe, an overreading of Berne.

The right to control reproduction—to exclude others from making copies—is,
as Article 9(1) of Berne makes clear, the core right granted under copyright. So
copyright is structured to protect an author’s interests, using a property rule as
the initial entitlement. But there is nothing inevitable about this choice; it is,
rather, a practical one. Authors’ interest in their works could have been
protected by using a liability rule as the initial entitlement, except that
structuring the entitlement in that way would require government to set a price
for the use of copyrighted works. In general, we do not believe that government
is well placed to set prices. In the absence of any indication that government
would be able to set a more accurate price for the right to reproduce a
copyrighted asset than would be set by a market transaction (and to do it more
cheaply as well), it makes sense to base copyright in a property rule, at least
with respect to the initial entitlement.246 It also makes sense to limit
government’s ability to mandate access to copyrighted works to the extent that
we fear that the nonmarket pricing decisions that such mandated access would
make necessary are unlikely to accurately track the market value of the asset.
Article 9(2) of Berne limits such government-mandated “exceptions” from the
author’s exclusive right; I will return to that provision shortly. But the
important point is that the purpose of the copyright system is not to protect a
rightsholder’s property right qua property right. The purpose of the copyright
system is to protect a rightsholder’s ability to use his initial entitlement, which
comes in the form of a property right, as a lever to pursue the exploitation
strategy best suited to his particular interests.
Seen in that light, it makes little sense to lump default licenses, in which
use is priced with the assistance of robust information produced by the author
himself, together with typical compulsory licenses, in which price is
determined by fiat (or, at best, fiat following administrative hearings at which
rightsholders and would-be compulsory licensees offer contending and self-
serving accounts of the worth of the assets at issue). Unlike in the case of
ordinary compulsory licenses, the default licenses attending new-style
formalities do not threaten to interfere with the exclusive rights of any
rightsholder who does not consider the use of a default license to be in his
interest. The objection to new-style formalities, then, is reduced to a narrow
protest that government should not force authors to decide whether to exploit
their right via a property rule or a liability rule, or, alternatively, that if
government does force the choice, the default should be a property rule rather
than a liability rule (i.e., rightsholders should have to affirmatively “opt in” to a
liability rule). These arguments would make the right to exclude truly totemic.
Berne (and domestic copyright law) would no longer be focused on protecting
authors’ abilities to exploit their works, but would be bound up instead in
246. Cf. Calabresi & Melamed, supra note 244, at 1126.

enforcing a particular property rule, not just as an initial entitlement, but as a

perpetual entitlement, even in instances where authors (and the public) would
benefit from the use of an alternative means of exploitation.
Article 9(2), TRIPs Article 13, and copyright “exceptions.” So the best
reading of Article 5(2), in my view, would be one which allows new-style
formalities. But assume for the moment, contrary to the arguments laid out
above, that the right to exclude is in fact a totemic right under Berne. Assume
then that the Article 5(2) prohibition of formalities that interfere with the
“enjoyment and exercise” of copyright focuses narrowly on maintaining
inviolate, throughout the term of copyright, the right to exclude, i.e., the
property rule. Assume also that new-style formalities impermissibly interfere
with the enjoyment and exercise of that right. The default licenses that enforce
new-style formalities may nonetheless still be permissible under Article 9(2),
which permits exceptions to the exclusive reproduction right in certain “special
cases,” provided that the excepted reproduction “does not conflict with a
normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the
legitimate interests of the author.” Article 13 of the TRIPs accord contains
similar language and generalizes Berne’s exceptions to all of the exclusive
rights granted under Berne and TRIPs (e.g., the rights to create derivative
works, to authorize public performances, and to authorize broadcasts).247
Ricketson states that exceptions permitted under Article 9(2) are subject in
all cases to respect for the author’s moral rights;248 that much is evident from
the three-step test in Article 9(2), which mixes economic and moral rights
concerns. It is also clear that the three criteria for restricting exclusive rights
must all be met in order for restrictions to be permissible. Further guidance in
how to apply the Article 9(2) test is available from the Report on the Berne
Revision Conference held in Stockholm in 1967:
If it is considered that reproduction conflicts with the normal exploitation of
the work, reproduction is not permitted at all. If it is considered that
reproduction does not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work, the
next step would be to consider whether it does not unreasonably prejudice the
legitimate interests of the author. Only if such is not the case would it be
possible in certain special cases to introduce a compulsory license, or to
provide for use without payment. A practical example might be photocopying
for various purposes. If it consists of producing a very large number of copies,
it may not be permitted, as it conflicts with a normal exploitation of the work.
247. TRIPs Article 13 provides that “[m]embers shall confine limitations or exceptions
to exclusive rights to certain special cases which do not conflict with a normal exploitation
of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder.”
TRIPs, supra note 16, art. 13; see also Jane C. Ginsburg, Toward Supranational Copyright
Law? The WTO Panel Decision and the “Three-Step Test” for Copyright Exceptions, 187
REVUE INTERNATIONALE DU DROIT D’AUTEUR 3 (2001) (analyzing the meaning of Article
13).
248. RICKETSON, supra note 208, at 489.
If it implies a rather large number of copies for use in industrial undertakings,

it may not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author,
provided that, according to national legislation, an equitable remuneration is
paid. If a small number of copies is made, photocopying may be permitted
without payment, particularly for individual or scientific use.249
There is another more recent, and perhaps more useful, interpretation of the
exceptions language. In June 2000, a dispute resolution panel of the World
Trade Organization (WTO) issued a report,250 in an action brought by the
European Communities, holding that Section 110(5) of the Copyright Act,251 a
provision establishing royalty-free compulsory licenses for the public
performance of radio or television transmissions of nondramatic musical works
for businesses, including restaurants and bars, below a certain size or using
certain “homestyle” stereo and television equipment, did not qualify as a
permitted exception under Article 13 of the TRIPs accord.252 The WTO panel
stated that Berne Article 9(2) and TRIPs Article 13 were to be construed in a
manner that avoided conflict,253 and it limned the scope of each of the three
elements of the Berne Article 9(2)/TRIPs Article 13 test.
“Normal exploitation.” Whether a system of default licenses conflicts with
the “normal exploitation” of a work can be thought of in two different ways.
One would reflect a totemic view of the right to exclude: that right, this
argument would hold, is the “normal” way in which works are exploited, and
therefore default licenses, which substitute a liability rule for the exclusionary
property rule, are incompatible with “normal exploitation.” But by that
reasoning, all compulsory licenses would run afoul of the “normal exploitation”
element of the Article 9(2) test, a result which makes no sense against the
background of a Berne provision intended to regulate, but not to prohibit, the
use of exceptions such as compulsory licenses.
The second, and better, construction of the “normal exploitation” element
would ask whether a default license would result, in comparison with normal
copyright remedies, in rightsholders in the aggregate realizing lower returns
from their works—or, as the WTO panel framed the question, whether the
excepted use would “enter into economic competition with the ways that right
holders normally extract economic value from . . . the work . . . and thereby
249. WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROP. ORG., RECORDS OF THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

CONFERENCE OF STOCKHOLM 1145-46 (1967).
250. World Trade Org., Report of the Panel, United States—Section 110(5) of the U.S.
Copyright Act, WT/DS160/R (June 15, 2000) [hereinafter Panel Report].
251. 17 U.S.C. § 110(5) (2000).
252. Panel Report, supra note 250, ¶ 7.1. For a good summary of the details of §
110(5), see Laurence R. Helfer, World Music on a U.S. Stage: A Berne/TRIPs and Economic
Analysis of the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, 80 B.U. L. REV. 93, 96-98 (2000).
253. Panel Report, supra note 250, ¶ 6.66.
deprive them of significant or tangible commercial gains.”254 As outlined

above, default licenses would apply only when a rightsholder failed to comply
with a low-cost formality. Failure to comply is a signal that the net present
value of expected future revenues from a work is lower than the cost of
compliance. The fee payable under the default license (i.e., the fee payable by
each user) is set to approximate the cost of compliance. Thus, for works that
fall under the default license, on average the rightsholder’s ability to “exploit”
the work will be, if anything, enhanced.
The argument that new-style formalities will not impair rightsholders’
abilities to exploit their works finds powerful support in the fair use doctrine,
which often has been characterized as a limitation on exclusive rights that
immunizes uses for which the transaction costs of negotiating a license exceed
the potential return to rightsholders from the license.255 Articles 10 and 10bis
of the Berne Convention list certain fair use-type exceptions to the exclusive
reproduction right; these include limited rights to make quotations256 and to use
works in aid of teaching257 and news reporting.258 Berne’s provision for fair
use shows that the Convention permits incursions on the exclusive reproduction
right when transaction costs make negotiated arrangements too costly. The
default licenses that back new-style formalities can be supported on the same
grounds—in fact, they are in some respects less invasive than fair use, because
use under a default license results in compensation, whereas use under the fair
use doctrine does not.
“Legitimate interests” and moral rights. The second requirement—that an
exempted reproduction “not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of
the author”—is susceptible, at least in part, to the same analysis. To the extent
that the author’s “legitimate interests” are taken to mean his ability to capture
whatever rents his exclusive rights will return, the default license does not
interfere.259 To the extent, however, that the phrase “legitimate interests” refers
to the author’s moral rights, additional analysis is required.
254. Id. ¶ 6.183; accord RICKETSON, supra note 208, at 483 (stating that “normal
exploitation” refers to “the ways in which an author might reasonably be expected to exploit
his work in the normal course of events”).
255. See generally 2 GOLDSTEIN, supra note 140, ch. 10 (explaining the fair use
doctrine).
257. Id. art. 10(2).
258. Id. art. 10bis(2).
259. Even if default licenses did systematically interfere with rightsholders’ ability to
profit from their works, that interference remains permissible so long as it does not create
“unreasonable prejudice.” As the WTO panel made clear, whether an exception creates
“unreasonable prejudice” will depend in part on whether compensation is provided to
rightsholders: “in cases where there would be [a] serious loss of profit for the copyright
owner, the law should provide him with some compensation (a system of compulsory
licensing with equitable remuneration).” Panel Report, supra note 250, ¶ 6.229 n.205
The “legitimate interests” of copyright holders (as well as the “enjoyment

and exercise” of copyright) is tied, as well, to the moral rights that Berne
requires signatories to grant to authors.260 Article 6bis of the Berne Convention
requires member states to grant authors rights of paternity (i.e., the “right to
claim authorship”) and integrity (i.e., the “right to object to any distortion,
mutilation or other modification” that would prejudice the author’s
reputation).261 These rights are independent of the author’s economic rights,
survive the transfer of those economic rights,262 and must, in most instances,
persist for at least the expiry of the economic rights, even following the death
of the author.263
It must be noted that since acceding to the Berne Convention, the United
States has refused to fully incorporate into its domestic law the moral rights set
out in Article 6bis. Instead, the United States has relied on a number of
different sources, including an author’s right under copyright law to control
derivative works; state unfair competition, defamation, and privacy laws; and
the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA),264 an amendment to the
copyright law granting limited rights of paternity and integrity to a narrowly
defined class of “works of visual art,”265 to approximate the Berne
requirements. Whether the United States currently complies with Berne Article
6bis is a subject beyond the scope of this Article.266 But it seems likely that
current U.S. law, if it complies at all, does so only minimally. The question is
whether subjecting certain works to the default licenses that attend new-style
formalities would subtract meaningfully from a level of protection for paternity
and integrity rights that is already stinting. If so, then the United States may fall
out of compliance with Article 6bis (or, perhaps, make its continued
noncompliance no longer tolerable).
(quoting WIPO Guide, supra note 208, at 56).

260. Although the facts before the WTO panel did not involve exceptions alleged to
affect moral rights, the panel suggested in its report that a rightsholder’s “legitimate
interests” need not be “limited to actual or potential economic advantage or detriment.” Id. ¶
6.223.
261. Berne Convention, supra note 14, art. 6bis(1).
262. Id.
263. Id. art. 6bis(2).
264. Pub. L. No. 101-650, §§ 601-610, 104 Stat. 5089, 5128-33 (1990) (codified in
scattered sections of 17 U.S.C.).
265. 17 U.S.C. § 106A (2000). As Goldstein notes, the moral rights granted under
VARA extend to a small number of valuable works that exist only in a single copy or that
are published in signed and numbered editions of no more than two hundred copies, and are
subject to limitations that “exempt[] from liability virtually all significant commercial uses
of artistic works.” GOLDSTEIN, supra note 195, at 284.
266. For a compelling argument that the United States has failed to comply with the
Berne standards for moral rights, see John Henry Merryman, The Refrigerator of Bernard
Buffet, 27 HASTINGS L.J. 1023 (1976).
Regardless of whether current U.S. protection of paternity and integrity

rights meets Berne minima, installing a system of new-style formalities need
not touch these rights at all: although the works of noncompliant rightsholders
would be subject to default licensing, the copyrights on works affected by the
regime would nonetheless be left formally intact. Accordingly, there is no
reason why the law could not specify that use of works under the default
licenses is subject, in all cases, to whatever (narrow) protection current U.S.
law affords to paternity and integrity rights.
But new-style formalities could go further, in a way that would strengthen
the United States’s commitment to facilitating the exercise of Berne-mandated
moral rights. One method would be to infuse into new-style formalities the type
of “some rights reserved” copyright customization that Creative Commons
provides now.267 New-style registration, notice, recordation of transfers, and
renewal could be designed to allow rightsholders to signal exactly which rights
they wish to retain, and which freedoms are allowed. The difference is that
instead of relying on a Creative Commons license, rightsholders’ choices about
which rights to reserve would be enforceable as a matter of positive law.
There are two potential advantages of the integration of new-style
formalities with the Creative Commons approach. First, it could be used to
strengthen U.S. compliance with Berne-mandated moral rights. Authors who
comply with new-style formalities could be permitted, in exchange for a
blanket grant of permission to use their works, to demand attribution in all
cases, even in instances, such as fair use, where the rightsholder would not
currently have the power to enforce such a demand. Similarly, authors who
comply with new-style formalities would be able to protect their integrity
rights, by permitting reproduction but restricting derivative uses.268
The second advantage is normative: by disaggregating economic from
moral rights, and the moral rights of paternity and integrity from one another,
new-style registration, notice, recordation, and renewal would allow us to
understand over time what people want in terms of rights for different types of
works, and how those desires change (if they do at all). That information would
be useful in the debate over future changes to the copyright laws.

268. This bolstering of the integrity right is limited, of course, by the demands of the
First Amendment. Any attempt to limit parody or criticism through a restriction on
derivative works should be repelled by the fair use doctrine.
FIGURE 6: LICENSE DISTRIBUTION CHOICES OF CREATIVE COMMONS

LICENSE USERS
3% don't
100%
require
attribution
90%
80% 33% allow

commercial
70% 67% allow use
derivative
60% works
50%
40%
97% require
30% attribution 67% don't allow
33% restrict commercial use
20% derivative works
10%
0%
Attribution Derivative Works Commercial Use
The data set out in Figure 6—data which was provided by Creative
Commons—shows the choices that Creative Commons licensors have made
over the first two years of the organization’s existence regarding which rights
to reserve and which to give away. Although rightsholders who seek out, or
become informed about, Creative Commons and decide to enter into a Creative
Commons license are certainly not representative of rightsholders as a broader
group, the Creative Commons license distribution data gives us some insight
into what the world might look like when copyright is no longer an on/off
switch, but is more finely variegated.
Perhaps most unexpectedly, the data shows that a significant majority
(67%) of Creative Commons licensors allow the use of their content in the
creation of derivative works. This data suggests that many rightsholders would
voluntarily abandon control over derivative works, which is an element both of
the author’s economic right and his right of integrity—although most who do
so (again 67%) would limit use to noncommercial derivative works.
In contrast, the Creative Commons data shows that almost all licensors
(97%) require attribution in exchange for permission to use their works. That
number suggests that the norm favoring attribution is strong, and, consequently,
that we may succeed in moving copyright closer to rightsholders’ expectations
and simultaneously free a large amount of creative work if we install a
mechanism for exchanging the right to control reproduction for a stronger

commitment to provide attribution.
“Certain special cases.” The final element of Article 9(2), the “certain
special cases” requirement, is exceedingly difficult to pin down. The first area
of difficulty is determining whether the element imposes a separate constraint
at all. The official WIPO commentary on Article 9(2) does not lay out any
guidelines for determining whether an exception fits under the “certain special
cases” language. Indeed, the commentary fails to mention “certain special
cases” as a separate requirement, and instead discusses only the “two
conditions” of protecting normal exploitation and avoiding unreasonable
prejudice to legitimate expectations—suggesting, perhaps, that the “certain
special cases” language does no more than reflect a situation in which the two
principal factors are met.269 The same sense is conveyed in the extract, quoted
above, from the Report of the Stockholm Revision of the Berne Convention,
which focuses on the “normal exploitation” and “legitimate interests” elements,
and suggests again that the “certain special cases” language refers entirely to
instances in which neither element is impinged upon.
The WTO panel took a different approach. Interpreting each of Article 13’s
three requirements to avoid any “redundancy or inutility,”270 the panel held that
the “certain special cases” language imposed a separate constraint on
exceptions and, in fact, that exceptions must first be shown to meet its
requirements before analysis of the other criteria is undertaken.271 The panel
read the “certain special cases” language to require that exceptions be “clearly
defined”272 and “narrow in [a] quantitative as well as a qualitative sense.”273
Applying these standards, the panel invalidated Section 110(5)(B)’s broad grant
of compulsory licenses for nondramatic musical works for businesses, holding
that the exception could not qualify as “narrow” when, according to evidence
before the panel, 70% of all restaurants, 73% of all bars, and 45% of all retail
stores qualified for compulsory licenses under the provision.274 In contrast, the
panel upheld the provisions of Section 110(5)(A) granting compulsory licenses
for dramatic musical works where the standards set out in the statute would
allow only 16% of restaurants, 13.5% of bars, and 18% of retail stores to
qualify for royalty-free compulsory licenses for a narrower class of copyrighted
works.275
269. WIPO Guide, supra note 208, at 55-57.

270. Panel Report, supra note 250, ¶ 6.97.
271. Id. ¶ 6.160.
272. Id. ¶ 6.108.
273. Id. ¶ 6.109.
274. Id. ¶¶ 6.122, 6.133.
275. Id. ¶¶ 6.142, 6.159.
For reasons that have been discussed earlier in this Article, we would
expect a large number of authors to fail to comply with registration and notice
requirements, and, similarly, the majority of rightsholders to fail to comply
with a renewal formality. Accordingly, a large number of works (in both
absolute and percentage terms) will be exposed to default licenses in a system
of new-style formalities. So one might read the WTO panel’s holding that
exceptions must be “narrow in a quantitative as well as a qualitative sense” as
ruling default licenses out as an exception permissible under Berne 9(2) or
TRIPs 13.
It should be noted, however, that the WTO panel’s report was issued in a
case involving royalty-free compulsory licensing, which means that, unlike in
the case of default licenses, the WTO panel was dealing with an exception that
eliminates rightsholders’ ability to receive compensation for their work for the
excepted uses. In that context, and in the absence of any particular provision in
Berne or TRIPs approving the particular compulsory licenses at issue, an
independent “special cases” element makes sense. If the touchstone of the
exceptions provision is preserving rightsholders’ abilities to profit from their
works, application of the “normal exploitation” and “legitimate interests”
elements might theoretically provide all the information needed to determine
whether an exception should be permitted. But, in practice, whether a particular
exception interferes with “normal exploitation” or a rightsholder’s “legitimate
interests” may be difficult to determine with certainty. The “certain special
cases” element can therefore be seen as providing an easily administered
threshold test: does this exception affect a large enough share of the potential
licensing market that it is likely to interfere with a rightsholder’s ability to
exploit his work?
But what role should the “certain special cases” element play in a case like
default licenses, where there is no systematic interference with rightsholders’
economic interests? In such an instance, the “certain special cases” language
may be both theoretically and practically coterminous with the “normal
exploitation” element, i.e., the number of works to which an exception applies
is required to be sufficiently limited that the market for a particular work is not
substantially affected. For works that have a ready market, even a relatively
small amount of excepted usage might affect the rightsholder’s ability to
exploit the work. But because the default licenses connected to new-style
formalities apply only after a rightsholder signals that his work does not enjoy a
substantial commercial market, even a relatively large number of excepted uses
made under a default license would not interfere with the rightsholder’s own
understanding of his ability to exploit the work. Put differently, there is a strong
argument that because default licenses arise only when the author or
rightsholder sends a signal that his work lacks significant commercial value, the
default license applies only in the “special case” where a liability rule is
preferred by the rightsholder.
Perhaps the most that can be said at this point about the “special cases”
element—and indeed about the Berne Article 9(2)/TRIPs Article 13 test
altogether—is (1) that on a proper reading of Berne Article 5(2), the need to
justify new-style formalities as an “exception” will never arise, and (2) if the
exceptions provision is applicable, the elements of the test are sufficiently
indeterminate (at least as they apply to default licenses, a mechanism that the
Berne drafters could not have had in mind when they formulated the Article
9(2) test) that the application of the test will involve not so much testing new-
style formalities under the formal elements as an evaluation of whether the
system of new-style formalities serves (or undermines) the foundational
principles of the Berne Convention. If Berne is focused on protecting authors’
ability to exploit their works, new-style formalities will be compatible with the
Convention. If Berne is focused, instead, on enforcing a particular property
rule, regardless of authors’ interests, then new-style formalities may fail under
the current text of the Convention.
CONCLUSION
My hope in writing this Article is that reformalization might reduce the

current friction over copyright to a level conducive to a broader discussion
about intellectual property reform. As the discussion above makes clear, the
stifling of creativity—as well as free speech—created by the current
unconditional copyright regime will only become worse with the passage of
time. Unlike more radical proposals for reforming copyright law,
reformalization is a task that can be accomplished with a few manageable and
realistic changes to international and domestic law and without endangering the
interests of any particular segment of the copyright community. Just as
importantly, unlike more limited proposals, reformalization would ensure that
creative material lacking commercial value becomes available for reuse
immediately.
With clear rules governing copyright protection and a formalities-
compliance system making use of the best technology available, a reformalized
copyright regime would reinstate the best aspects of the old U.S. copyright
system while leaving behind the bureaucratic difficulties that turned
“formalities” into a despised term decades ago. Though this Article does not
offer a political road map for achieving the legislative changes needed for
reformalization, the proposal outlined above shows that significant reform can
take place without damaging the interests of copyright owners who would
otherwise have strong incentives to oppose the creation of a less restrictive
copyright regime. The challenge now is to turn these academic concepts into
actual changes in domestic and international laws.

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SAVE THE MUSIC/CREATIVE COMMONS “Orphan Works” Comments

March 25, 2005

Proceedings before the US. Copyright Office

by Orphan Works1 and to submit the attached proposal.

I. INTERESTS OF SAVE THE MUSIC AND CREATIVE COMMONS IN THIS

A. SAVE THE MUSIC < http://savethemusic.com/>

1. SAVE THE MUSIC’s Mission

concerts and other activities.

every continent and has volunteer representatives in nineteen cities worldwide.

2. SAVE THE MUSIC’s Experience of the Orphan Works Problem

Works and are essentially unusable.

public the benefit of the cultural value of these works.

affirmation of the Jewish will to survive:

Never say that you are going on your last way

Semitism and Islamic fundamentalism, STM believes its message of resistance,

perseverance, and hope remains as important and relevant as ever.

profit organization like STM, it is practically impossible.

Yiddish music’s influence on general American culture. Ludwig Satz is an anthology of

relevance to wider American culture.

section on the intertwining of Yiddish and American culture.

3. The Current System Frustrates Both SAVE THE MUSIC’s Creative

share its content despite its best efforts and intentions.

B. CREATIVE COMMONS <http://creativecommons.org>

1. The Mission of CREATIVE COMMONS

uses are permitted.

not profit from their use.”3

govern that use.

COMMONS’ second free tool: the CC smart search engine

available under a noncommercial license.

CREATIVE COMMONS’ marking and searching technologies have unearthed an unmet

in 12 different languages, adapted to the laws of 15 different jurisdictions. Adopters of the

2. The Success of CREATIVE COMMONS Suggests a Solution to the

assistance to copyright’s overarching objective of encouraging the creation and dissemination of

CC’s licensing model does not solve this problem.

effectively and fairly addressing the Orphan Works problem.

II. THE ORPHAN WORKS PROBLEM IS A SERIOUS ONE THAT MERITS A

A. The Simultaneous Increase in the Scope of Copyright Protection and the

An Orphan Work is—broadly speaking—any copyrighted work that is out-of-print or

that many desired uses are never made.

need to ask for permission or the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits.

III. THE PROPOSAL

A. An Appropriate, Well-tailored Response Would Be to Establish a Registry to

1. Proposal for Published Works

period following publication.

damages against infringers—whatever current law allows

available against use under a default license.

against the Orphan Fund.

Registrants will be required to keep contact information current. If a registrant transfers

unreachable, or cannot provide the current rightsholder’s contact information..

The registration and renewal requirements would apply prospectively. Similar

during which rightsholders of currently unregistered works would be given an opportunity to

made available for use under the default license.

2. Proposal for Unpublished Works

Those privacy interests attenuate substantially upon the author’s death.

in the Federal Register.

IV. AS PROPOSED HERE, A ORPHAN WORKS REGISTRY WOULD NOT

Orphan Works that are impossible now will be made possible.

control of the rightsholder. Accordingly, a particular rightsholder’s decision to rely on the

539-545, 551-568 (2004) (attached).

we have described in the proposal set forth above.

486 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 57:485

1. The reciprocity principle .......................................................................... 546

November 2004] REFORM(ALIZ)ING COPYRIGHT 487